There is no free lunch in technology. Strict reference counting is always more expensive than GC. Theoretically, compiled languages with extensive lifetime anal

There is no free lunch in technology. Strict reference counting is always more expensive than GC. Theoretically, compiled languages with extensive lifetime analysis and reference counting elision could produce better performance (think Rust borrow checker and lifetime annotations but you don't do the heavy lifting) but this is yet to be done and no language has this today (Swift is slower than top tier GC languages at this).