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Immediate reclamation, yes. There do exist a number of reference-allocation algorithms that performs deferred reclamation similar to how tracing GC does.

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Yes, but that still leaves the circular dependency problem.

And tbh I don't think I ever saw a circular dependency in a system

I'm not saying they don't exist of course (or that GC/RC shouldn't cater for them) but it's a very specific use case

A doubly linked list already creates a circular dependency.

True (especially if it's a circular one) but those can be weakrefs/softrefs

There do exist algorithms for resolving them, and that process can too be deferred, but also restricted to subgraphs and only when cycles are possible.

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