> I may misunderstand your remark, as 'releasing' is a bit ambiguous. The reference is released; ie the (atomic) reference count is decremented (and the object

> I may misunderstand your remark, as 'releasing' is a bit ambiguous. The reference is released; ie the (atomic) reference count is decremented (and the object is only freed if that caused the atomic reference count to go to zero). > From the paper I missed that there was a paper and was referring to the proposed implementation in python that was described in TFA. IIUC, biased refcount (in paper) is local (in my description), and shared is atomic, correct? > the shared ref count can go negative And that makes sense. Thanks. (And also explains how to deal with references added by one thread and removed by another, when one of those threads is the object owner.)