But still some of the most popular game platforms use GC, like Unity (C#) and iOS.
I haven't seen an AAA or AA title that used Unity, they mostly make their own, use Ogre, Crytek or Unreal.
Unreal is defacto industry standard.
iOS, has ARC IIRC, not sure it has true GC like Java or C#. ARC is a super primitive GC.
> Ref counting does pause, you get cascading deallocations.
That's not pausing. That's it doing work, upon request (i.e. when the object is released). If you have a single object that roots a massive object graph, and you release that single object, yes, it will have to destruct that entire object graph. But that's not the fault of ARC in the slightest, and would happen just the same with manual memory management.
> More deterministic than other GC though.
It's not GC, so what do you mean by "other GC"?
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ARC has the exact same performance characteristics as manual memory management, except it's all automated so you can't screw it up (e.g. over-releasing or under-retaining). But it's subject to optimizations too (such as skipping the autorelease pool), which actually makes it faster than MRR in a lot of cases.
GC pauses are because of work in other forms of GC too.
As for explicitness... no. that's not explicit in my book.
It's a super primitive in a same way an abacus is a super primitive computer.
Also, it is like a super primitive GC, in that it's a much more primitive and much more performant automatic memory management system (like GC). It's just a different level of abstraction we're talking here.
It's no different than saying how is polygon is like a super primitive circle.
Various embedded languages could have GC (e.g. Lua has a GC), but the only GC that's shipped in iOS itself is in JavaScriptCore.