Actually, reference counting needs some garbage collection in order to handle cyclic structures. I believe that basically refcounting is more space-efficient an

Actually, reference counting needs some garbage collection in order to handle cyclic structures. I believe that basically refcounting is more space-efficient and less CPU-efficient. I'm not totally sure about this, and it might depend on the actual techniques used on both sides as well. If a justification is to be given for this switch, I would say that increasing RAM size is generally easier than increasing CPU speed. Obviously, operating on a GC is never ideal on a resource-constrained system, but most modern scripting languages wouldn't be the same without it. The only example I know of, of a scripting language that has the feeling of the scripting language but without using a GC is Newlisp (http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html http://www.newlisp.org/MemoryManagement.html).