> cites some external work showing tracing garbage collection as a lazily evaluated form of reference counting (using a saturating 1-bit counter) taken to the l

> cites some external work showing tracing garbage collection as a lazily evaluated form of reference counting (using a saturating 1-bit counter) taken to the limit. Yup. The paper you're thinking of is "A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection": https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590p/05au/p50-bacon.pdf https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590p/05au/p50-b...