I'm not sure most people use this technique, but when I was using RC-based systems, I would often assert that an object's refcount was 1 just before I let go of

I'm not sure most people use this technique, but when I was using RC-based systems, I would often assert that an object's refcount was 1 just before I let go of that last reference. Suddenly, we have RAII-like predictable destruction. I even built it into Vale as one of its memory management options called "constraint references" [0] though later switched to generational references which gave us RAII without the halts. I sometimes wonder how far I could have taken that RC + assert model. In my experience, the vast majority of objects even in an RC'd language do have strong refcount = 1. Perhaps we were in different domains though, I was mostly in game dev and app dev. [0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/raii-next-steps https://verdagon.dev/blog/raii-next-steps