I worked in Swift for just over a year. Love the language. But unfortunately you can still get reference cycles that leak memory. And they can be basically unsolvable with a large enough app. Merely avoiding GC doesn't fix all your problems!
Reference counting is listed as a strategy to achieve garbage collection. Broadly speaking, garbage collection is the process of automatically managing the lifecycles of objects in memory, which reference counting certainly achieves.
```
struct Node {
var next: Node?
var prev: Node?var a = Node(next: nil, prev: nil)
let b = Node(next: nil, prev: a)
a.next = b
```
These two objects will persist in memory for the entire life of the app even when all reference to a and b are gone, except for their references to one another.