The manual reference counting system in old objective-c provides a better solution which while still cumbersome, doesn't prevent good powerful APIs.
The automatic reference counting capability of Delphi interfaces always seemed like a good idea to me, but seems to be rarely used.
How? Set the return type of the function to be the object type you want, then result := TYourObjectType.Create; and you'll return a newly constructed object.
No it doesn't.
The automatic reference counting capability of Delphi interfaces always seemed like a good idea to me, but seems to be rarely used.
You mean rarely used by people who are amatures, developers have always been pushed towards programming against interfaces.
However one of the compiler's designers has an experimental branch which allows you to mark classes as being automatically managed and any instance and use of those classes becomes reference counted. So at some point it might become part of the main compiler (although it is probably far from now since AFAIK it isn't something people really ask for from FPC and there are other things to do).