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Refcounting is indeed a form of GC (and the languages that want to handle cycles then need an extra form of GC on top of it).

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GC specifically means you leave unreferenced mem on the heap until it gets collected in one big sweep later.

You're referring specifically to tracing garbage collection. When a reference count reaches zero, that garbage is collected, often recursively. Among programming language designers, ARC is considered a GC strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s...

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/reference-counting-garbage-col...

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