Yeah, that's what I meant to include by "behave very differently". I don't think we disagree on anything technical here. The problem is if you are currently googling for garbage collection you will mostly get garbage results. Here's duckduckgo to avoid my search bubble: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=garbage+collection+programming
The first result is the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_%28computer... It's pretty bad, under "Strategies" it lists three: Tracing, Reference Counting and Escape Analysis. I'm sure these three are similar things.
The second result is this blog post, also listing rereference counting as gc: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-guide-to-garbage-collect...
And the third result looks okay. Searching for "tracing garbage collection" has better results. The text in question already uses "gc" most of the time, and has a footnote saying:
> By "garbage collection", we're referring to tracing garbage collection.
I think that's as clear as it gets, without going on rant about the names of things. You are clearly an expert in garbage collectors, but most people in the target audience of that article are not. The article compares the differences between rc and gc. If someone then goes and reads the wikipedia articles about either of those they will be very confused because wikipedia will tell them rc is gc. A "fad" like this can't be undone, once a usage of a word becomes this popular you can't undo it.
Okay, sorry, this was too long, and we agree to like 99% anyway. Have a nice day! :)
