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> Reference counting time is proportional to data structure sizes on deletion.

The actual garbage collection in all collectors is proportional to the amount of data that needs to be deleted. There are plenty of implementations of refcounting where the data is pushed into a freelist or cleaned up deferred.

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At which point you start making RC behave more like tracing collectors, so why not start with them in first place?

Also there are generational tracing compacting collectors with (almost) no pauses, so I doubt such approach wins over them when measuring performance and fragmentation across application usages.

> The actual garbage collection in all collectors is proportional to the amount of data that needs to be deleted.

This is false, copying GC is a simple counterexample

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