Doesn't Vala use reference counting? [1] I'm not actually sure; do you have some pointers I could read here?
1: http://www.vala-project.org/doc/vala/Overview.html#Memory_ma...
1: http://www.vala-project.org/doc/vala/Overview.html#Memory_ma...
Vala's wiki has a page all about its ownership mechanism: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Ownership
Thanks for the link, I'll dig in!