That is true, but what if the shared count were initialized to one and the creator thread frees an object when the shared count is equal to one and the local co

That is true, but what if the shared count were initialized to one and the creator thread frees an object when the shared count is equal to one and the local count is decremented zero? (Since it knows it holds one shared reference.) Then the increment and decrement would be avoided for non-shared objects.