> When the unowned ref-counting is "on", effectively it's like running a memory > checker on the unowned refs. If they are used after the owned ref is > destroyed, that's an error. valgrind/purify would give you the same > information.
But would they? In Gel the existence of dangling references is detected, with valgrind the deref of a dangling reference is detected. Gel is more pessimistic, it assumes that every dangling pointer is a time-bomb and that's also what [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Undangle.pdf](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Undangle.pdf) suggests.
