Isn’t reference counting a type of garbage collection?

I feel like you can’t put Swift in the world of Rust/Ada/C/C++

It is, and for Apple, it is the successor of their system languages, explicitly stated on Swift documentation.

Here enjoy a full graphical workstation OS developed at Xerox PARC, Mesa/Cedar uses reference counting with a cycle collector.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

> Isn’t reference counting a type of garbage collection?

Reference counting leads to memory leaks if cycles occur. Garbage collection algorithms don't have this problem.

I checked and you are not correct.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer...

Reference counting is a type of garbage collection.

On the other hand:

"Garbage collection vs. ARC"

https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript#gc (Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31139610)

This (sub)headline only makes sense if garbage collection and ARC are different concepts.

Hmm I think they are referring to GC as “traditional” GC, but I will concede that they don’t seem to say that.

Er, does Swift have any of Ada's safety properties or proof tooling?

> Swift

> REPL based

What?

I don’t use Swift very often, but when I do, I use the REPL to experiment with new code snippets, just as I would for Lisp languages, Julia, or Python.