The RAII/ref-counting technique often works great, but not always. Cyclic structures are a problem -- so, if you've got, say, a global tree structure with bidi

The RAII/ref-counting technique often works great, but not always. Cyclic structures are a problem -- so, if you've got, say, a global tree structure with bidirectional parent/child links, you'll need some kind of special-casing to make ref-counting clean up an entire abandoned subtree. A full GC does take care of cases like this.