I agree that the API and interop with C/C++ is a huge issue and something I haven't seen good articles on. But I was sort of put off from reference counting by

I agree that the API and interop with C/C++ is a huge issue and something I haven't seen good articles on. But I was sort of put off from reference counting by working with Python extensions that leaked memory many years ago. It's so easy to forget a ref count operation. I don't have data, but I suspect it happens a lot in practice. With tracing, you have to annotate stack roots (and global roots if you have them). To me that seems less error prone. You can overapproximate them and it doesn't really change much. Moving is indeed a big pain, and I'm about to back out of it for Oil :-/ ---- edit: I don't have any experience with Objective C, but I also think this comment is unsurprising, and honestly I would probably get it wrong too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283641 I feel like ref counting is more "littered all over your code" than GC is, which means there's more opportunity to get it wrong.