On Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 19:51:05 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
The developers working on .NET had the opportunity to learn from Java, yet they went with GC.[0] Anyone that says one approach is objectively better than the other is clearly not familiar with all the arguments - or more likely, believes their problem is the only real programming problem.
Reference counting isn't a general solution, and it is very slow when you allow flexible programming paradigms that generate lots of objects.
So, it all depends on how much flexibility you want to allow for your programmers and still having reasonable performance.
(The vast majority of high level programming languages use GC and has done so since the 60s.)
