Pausing a single thread to release memory is not what is considered a "pause". Even if pausing a single thread could be a problem, you can trivially offload rel

Pausing a single thread to release memory is not what is considered a "pause". Even if pausing a single thread could be a problem, you can trivially offload releasing to another thread. A pause is when all application threads get paused. Hence, reference counting does not have a problem of pauses, and tracing often does.