Someone mentioned returning a closure from a function. That's something that is done all the time in higher-level languages and hard to do without a GC. Also,

Someone mentioned returning a closure from a function. That's something that is done all the time in higher-level languages and hard to do without a GC. Also, in general GC's are much faster than reference counting (especially when the reference count updates needs to be thread-safe), so the only reason one would use them is to have deterministic object destructions. These aren't common at all and should not be the deciding factor when choosing a memory management scheme.