No - they already had GC working with Objective-C and could have chosen it for swift if they had thought it was the best technology.<p>Here&#x27;s a quote from Chris Lattner:<p>&quot;GC also has several <i>huge</i> disadvantages that are usually glossed over: while it is true that modern GC&#x27;s can provide high performance, they can only do that when they are granted <i>much</i> more memory than the process is actually using.  Generally, unless you give the GC 3-4x more memory than is needed, you’ll get thrashing and incredibly poor performance.  Additionally, since the sweep pass touches almost all RAM in the process, they tend to be very power inefficient (leading to reduced battery life).<p>I’m personally not interested in requiring a model that requires us to throw away a ton of perfectly good RAM to get an “simpler&quot; programming model - particularly on that adds so many tradeoffs.&quot;