How fundamental is garbage collection in various aspects of MacRuby?

a. Is garbage collection a hard requirement for MacRuby to be a ruby 
implementation, i.e. Does Ruby itself as a language / platform / runtime pose 
garbage collection as more or less a hard requirement? I wouldn't have thought 
so, but I'd like to hear the opinions of the more experienced.

b. Are there parts of MacRuby, other than the area around object creation and 
lifecycle management, that depend on garbage collection in a major way, such 
that thinking of MacRuby and ARC on the same page would not make any practical 
sense?

c. Could ARC be something that gc.c uses as an implementation feature, rather 
than the obj-c runtime GC in its current form, such that an ARC version of 
MacRuby could be created through relatively isolated changes in the memory 
management area?

The background to this question is that I had observed a fair amount of 
keenness in the iOS development community to program with Ruby. I even remember 
seeing a trigger-happy blog article about MacRuby for iOS a few months back 
when most likely the ARC feature was mistaken for garbage collection.

I'm uncertain how larger-than-reality my observation was, but I for one would 
be much happier if I could write iOS apps using MacRuby.

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