Colloquially, "garbage collection" typically refers to non-deterministic automatic memory management (and/or stop-the-world), whereas ref-counting is typically

Colloquially, "garbage collection" typically refers to non-deterministic automatic memory management (and/or stop-the-world), whereas ref-counting is typically considered deterministic Not really correct in an academic sense, but this isn't the only language I've seen talk about ref-counting as something other than garbage collection