IMO, It is very beneficial for standard library and standard types to be free of garbage collected primitives. Everything becomes a lot more light weight and thread safe by default. Owned refs have zero runtime costs which makes it a competitive advantage.
The reference counting can be available as library. Standard Library should not use it, but it can be made available. It can be implemented in 100 lines of code right here and right now with Nim destructors. I would say that given we currently have garbage collector available, it would be unwise just to remove it. Let's make it available as library for those who need it. This would be the best of all worlds.
