One thing I don't miss now writing in Swift is a garbage collector. Are there other languages that do something similar to Swift? It seems most languages either use a GC of some kind or make you do your own heap management.
I think it's both fair to say that reference counting is a form of garbage collection (dynamic lifetime determination is dynamic lifetime determination), but also remark that reference counting has notably distinct performance characteristics (some good, some bad) compared to a tracing collector.
Which is not true if a data structure happens to have a strong reference, like in a cache or event handler, thus "leaking" in a true garbage collector.
That doesn't defeat the definition of a garbage collector. You wouldn't then say no GC exists... but in the case of no inbound references then that's memory that can definitively be cleared.
C++'s shared_ptr (not a language feature but in standard library), Python (has GC but only for detecting cycle references AFAIK), Perl, PHP. Lots of OOP libraries for C: COM, GLib. RC, ARC in Rust.
Technically true, but in reality it is just a token effort to please Hans Bohem and get him to focus on designing the C++ concurrent memory model instead :).
As of today, I don't think any implementation actually offers optional GC, so those functions are alway just trivially implemented.
