See the answer for the 2nd comment:

Memory management is cooperating with Objectve-C runtime memory mgmt, see https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin-native/blob/master/runti... (function runDeallocationHooks())

That article mentions "Object pinning", something usually only useful when you have a GC.

> Is kotlin native reference counted like swift or do they use some form of garbage collection?

Reference counting is garbage collection.