You have a good point that applies in a lot of places, but here you're aiming it at a straw man. Linus advocates reference counting and even suggests building i

You have a good point that applies in a lot of places, but here you're aiming it at a straw man. Linus advocates reference counting and even suggests building it into the language would be a good idea. That's hardly hand coding anything- it's just a different strategy for GC (which is actually done). It is getting harder and harder to beat compilers with hand-coded assembly without an enormous amount of effort, though.