Espruino does use reference counting, and currently falls back to proper Garbage Collection if available memory gets filled with cyclic datastructures. Respond

Espruino does use reference counting, and currently falls back to proper Garbage Collection if available memory gets filled with cyclic datastructures. Responding to IO is handled and timestamped using interrupts, so if you write your code such that you use the timestamp, you can actually do some very accurate timing. One other good point is (strangely) power usage. As there's an interpreter, it can very easily detect when it isn't doing anything and can go into low power sleep modes - it's something that you can do with another MCU and a lot of effort, but that you get for free with Espruino. There are things it's good for and things it isn't - but for the majority of projects people do with Arduino I think it really does provide value.