Unless you go absolutely ham with smart pointers (which everyone knows not to do if you care about performance), C++ isn’t really a reference counting language.

Unless you go absolutely ham with smart pointers (which everyone knows not to do if you care about performance), C++ isn’t really a reference counting language. I wouldn’t call RAII “reference counting”. I mean, I guess, but it’s the programmer or the compiler doing it. I’m talking about runtime reference counting.