ref counting has a couple of pros and cons: cons - can't handle circular references - sudden churning when something at the root of a large tree can be freed,

ref counting has a couple of pros and cons: cons - can't handle circular references - sudden churning when something at the root of a large tree can be freed, causing recursive freeing. - it really doesn't like multithreading pros - deterministic in a single threaded environment - pretty efficient (4 byte overhead on every object) - easy to implement