> this meme needs to die. Garbage collection is not "super sophisticated reference counting", and in fact, can't even be used in most places where reference cou

> this meme needs to die. Garbage collection is not "super sophisticated reference counting", and in fact, can't even be used in most places where reference counting is used. It's not a substitution, or a superset, of reference counting. I never said that garbage collection is sophisticated reference counting so if you've seen that "meme," it wasn't here. But reference counting and tracing are two classical approaches to garbage collection, the garbage collection literature does refer counting as a garbage collection algorithm, and refcounting is used for garbage collection in languages such as Rust. Refcounting has other uses, too, but this discussion is about garbage collection and not about 101 uses for refcounting. Anyway, reference counting GC is not intrinsically more primitive or worse-performing than tracing, but in practice, tracing GCs tend to be sophisticated, while languages that rely on refcounting usually employ a rather simple algorithm. In fact, this is one of the attractions of refcounting for GC: it is easier to get OK performance with primitive refcounting than with primitive tracing.