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RC is a GC algorithm, so it is already there.

No it is not. The whole point of GC is to collect cycles and not think about ownership, while Swift and Rust require you to think about ownership.

In Rust you do so via borrow checker or explicit Rc/Weak wrappers. In Swift you do that via additional weak annotations (strong being the implicit default).

Grandparent is correct. Reference counting is a garbage collection mechanism. In same way a bubble sort is a sort.

It doesn't care about ownership either. Apart from some Swift specific optimizations iiuc.

Full GC I mentioned is more of mark and sweep variety.

Alright, malloc/free is also garbage collection then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s...

See Reference counting. Note lack of malloc/free.

Ref counting is considered GC (despite the colloquial definition excluding it) because RC handles the same problem domain as full GC, even with drawbacks around cycles. malloc/free, on the other hand, are just ways to allocate and release memory. They're too low level to be garbage collection.

See this excellent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32277088

I advise some self education in CS contents regarding GC.

You can start here,

https://gchandbook.org/

https://www.udemy.com/course/essentials-of-garbage-collector...

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