> cito has no own garbage collector. You get what the target language offers. If it's C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, then there is a GC. In C, C++ and Swift, there are stack variables and reference counting for dynamic allocations. In OpenCL there are only stack variables.
So you can (and probably should) do almost any memory management as you would in C++. Except I don't see any alternative for `weak_ptr` at the moment.
Well that's already out the door because I almost never use shared_ptr in C++ code. The C++ core guidelines recommend using unique_ptr whenever possible. If you're going to use shared_ptr literally everywhere you do dynamic allocation, you'd be better off using a tracing GC to avoid the extra pointer indirection (and cache miss) with every dereference.
It seems to me that Cito should have manual memory management because a manual memory language can be trivially mapped onto a GC language (just turn every free or delete to an nop), while the inverse problem is intractable in the general case.
A shared_ptr can be optimized to unique_ptr if it's not copied.
Not sure what you mean by "a GC language". Most cito targets are garbage-collected.