Ref counting is considered GC (despite the colloquial definition excluding it) because RC handles the same problem domain as full GC, even with drawbacks around

Ref counting is considered GC (despite the colloquial definition excluding it) because RC handles the same problem domain as full GC, even with drawbacks around cycles. malloc/free, on the other hand, are just ways to allocate and release memory. They're too low level to be garbage collection. See this excellent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32277088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32277088