> That is almost certainly not what David Bacon thinks. I don't know how you could get that idea from reading the introduction. Reference counting is a form of garbage collection, period.

I'm not sure what you're reading. I will quote:

"Tracing and reference counting are uniformly viewed as being fundamentally different approaches to garbage collection that possess very distinct performance properties"

Saying reference counting is an approach that garbage collection can use is certainly valid, but is not the same as saying that reference counting is a form of garbage collection, which is nonsensical usage IMO.

Further evidence that the author believes that reference counting alone is insufficient for garbage collection:

"Finally, tracing collects cyclic garbage while reference counting does not. As a result, when reference counting is applied to heaps that may contain cyclic garbage, cycles must either be collected using a backup tracing collector [43] or with a trial deletion algorithm"

"One of the primary disadvantages of reference counting collec- tors is that they do not find cyclic garbage. Therefore, an additional mechanism is required."

Regarding "who was first", although I don't have any supporting proof, I'd be shocked if usage of manually managing reference counting hasn't predated both automatic memory management and garbage collectors, which isn't a technique constrained to, say Objective-C.

Also worthy of mention, some referenced counted garbage collection implementations (e.g. CPython) vend an API for disabling the GC, which certainly has no implications on reference counting.