It priorities performance in one important respect: by providing direct access to C. It's common in many languages to write performance critical sections in C o

It priorities performance in one important respect: by providing direct access to C. It's common in many languages to write performance critical sections in C or even assembly. This is trivial in ObjC, which has C as a subset, so it is done more often than in e.g. Python or Java. Interoperability with FFIs is one of the advantages of reference counting over GC. You don't have to worry about pinning allocations, allocation coloring, unscanned roots, etc. The ObjC refcounting operations (CFRetain/CFRelease), and the collection types (CFArray, CFString, CFSet...) are all trivially available from C as well. I speculate that this better interoperability with C is why Apple deprecated GC and went with ARC. We can see Microsoft sort of moving in the same direction with WinRT.