Lol, what? Maybe don’t go asserting stuff you clearly know little about. Reference counting is a fine tradeoff for manual memory-managed languages, but it is absolutely smoked out of the water by a tracing GC on most counts. It’s almost like JVM, V8, etc engineers know a thing about the topic and don’t have RC for a good reason.

Tracing GC doesn’t burden the mutator threads with additional work, almost everything can be done in parallel, resulting in vastly better throughput. Imagine dropping the last reference to a huge graph, one can actually observe it when exiting a c++ program, it might hang for a few seconds before returning control to you, as all the destructors are recursively called, serially, on the program thread, literally pointer by pointer jumping across the heap, the very thing you are so afraid of. And I didn’t even get to the atomic part, bumping a number up or down with synchronization between CPUs is literally the slowest operation you can do on a modern machine. Tracing GCs elegantly avoid all these problems at the price of some memory overhead. None of these GC algorithms (yes, RC is a GC) is a silver bullet, but let’s not joke ourselves.