Exactly, I like implementing compilers and I personally never bother with anything other than reference counting nowadays. Ref count gives a very easy to reason

Exactly, I like implementing compilers and I personally never bother with anything other than reference counting nowadays. Ref count gives a very easy to reason semantics. So I count as a feature in my language even if it's slower than GC. Moreover, some of the "memory leak" discussions nowadays miss the biggest issue behind memory leak, which is resource allocation. Some people measure memory leak as the # bytes that process didn't deallocate at the time of exit.