[citation needed] Reference counting is widely considered one strategy of garbage collection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_scienc

[citation needed] Reference counting is widely considered one strategy of garbage collection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s...). For that matter, some GCs that are primarily tracing also use ref counts for some portion of the heap, as an optimization (just as some primarily refcounting GCs also run a trace to clean up cycles). Also, reference counting can certainly result in pauses, when large graphs of interconnected objects are reclaimed. On the upside, you know when a pause might happen. You still don't know for certain without explicitly keeping track of what is about to be freed, which would add additional overhead, and indeed may not be practical or even feasible.