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Is there any reference/confirmation for all of this? The fact that the author types "Swift" under quotes and doesn't know that refcount is something inherited from Objective C and the whole OS rely on it makes the rest of claims a bit more gossipy.

Also, AFAIK MS translation of x86 -> ARM works different than Rosetta2, so the results aren't just because "Apple added Intel's memory ordering to their CPU" (whatever that means)

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The author did type "Swift" but it applies to Obj-C also, obviously. I wouldn't discount the whole post because of that slip-up. The optimizations made to reference counting are more than "gossip". David Smith posted about this weeks ago also, if you need more reference/confirmation than that I'm not sure what to tell you.

may also apply to Rust where we often make use of reference counting when the borrow checker isn’t enough

ARC probably yes (assuming the standard library annotates the atomic operations properly). RC no. That being said, it sounds like in general uncontended atomic operations are faster so this might benefit a lot of atomic code in any language.

While I was also thrown off by the lack of reference to Objective-C, in context I think the author used quotes around “Swift” to make it clear it’s a proper name and that he’s not talking about a “swift (ie fast) programming language”.

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