Being a geek who is somewhat into PLT and hobbyist languages, I go back and forth a bit on whether I want a GC or RC in my own hobby lang. For the longest time

Being a geek who is somewhat into PLT and hobbyist languages, I go back and forth a bit on whether I want a GC or RC in my own hobby lang. For the longest time I was going to go with per-thread heaps that use a simple compacting GC, but only collect on allocation when heap starts running low, so collection wouldn't have to stop threads, the local thread would already be stopped. The plan was to use RC most likely for multithreaded shared objects from a shared heap as a secondary. Then I started writing Rust and I realized what I think is the same point Lattner has here: Ownership changes everything. If I can declare a single owner most of the time and track that owner, I only have to bump the counter when I add a 2nd (and 3rd, etc.) owner, which isn't nearly as common as single ownership. This gets rid of most of the issues with RC performance (which in naive schemes bumps the counter every time it calls a function and more). RC still can't use bump allocation unfortunately, so any tree building would likely need arenas in addition which is a bummer, but deterministic destruction is a huge bonus, so this is the way I'm leaning atm (if I ever get back to writing it that is!).