Different terms can have (slightly) different meanings in different contexts. As I said, I think in practice any form of memory management that the language ru

Different terms can have (slightly) different meanings in different contexts. As I said, I think in practice any form of memory management that the language runtime/compiler does for you is considered garbage collection in the colloquial sense, but any such system where you have to use a specific language construct (such as std::shared_ptr or Rc) are not. I'd also note that Python doesn't just do reference counting: it also has a tracing garbage collector that collects unreachable reference cycles. I'm not sure if Swift does something similar.