I should add that reference counting GCs are nice because short-lived garbage is freed immediately and there's no need to look for garbage, so they're much fast

I should add that reference counting GCs are nice because short-lived garbage is freed immediately and there's no need to look for garbage, so they're much faster than scanning GCs. Reference counting GCs can have GC-like pauses when releasing objects that have singular references to many many many other objects, but the same is true in manual memory management systems.