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>Garbage collection generally refers to more complex systems that periodically identify and free unused objects in a less deterministic manner.

No, this is a subset of garbage collection called tracing garbage collection. "Garbage collection" absolutely includes refcounting.

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There’s just no good reason to conflate the two. Rust’s Arc and C++’s std::shared_ptr do not reclaim reference cycles, so you can call it “garbage collection” if you want, but the colloquial understanding is way more useful.

The coloquial term is like people arguing about coaching a footbal team without making it into the field.

Chapter 5, https://gchandbook.org/contents.html

Other CS quality references can be provided with similar table of contents.

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