Yes, garbage collection seems to be the only viable solution for dealing with spaghetti reference graphs in their full generality, including possible cycles. I

Yes, garbage collection seems to be the only viable solution for dealing with spaghetti reference graphs in their full generality, including possible cycles. In that context it's worth trying a high-performance concurrent GC implementation such as https://github.com/chc4/samsara https://github.com/chc4/samsara Samsara.