Not really, reference counting is generally considered to be more performant than GC. GC can end up thrashing the cache and doesn&#x27;t work very well when using more than 8 to 16 GB of RAM.<p>Even the linux kernel uses reference counting as you need a rc &#x2F; gc system to solve some problems.<p>ARC just inserts the retain&#x2F;release calls that you&#x27;d make anyway, pretty much everyone agrees that there are very few degenerate cases with ARC and in the vast majority of cases it does the best that can be done, which is why almost everyone uses ARC now. (You can still turn it off if you really want in ObjC)