Yeah I mean to write GC. Automatic reference counting (ARC) is a form of garbage collection. Altough I normally don't like to refer to it as such, but if I don't all the pedantics will come out of the woodwork to correct me ;-)

What we normally think of as GC is of course things like mark and sweep. Systems where the world is stopped and a complex algorithm is used to find memory to free.

ARC in my opinion is very close to how manual memory management works.