If you don't need to "reclaim memory immediately", you can often use arenas, a.k.a. regions - freeing an arena does not incur a "stop the world" pause. Similarly, most "big data structures" have little use for reference counting in their internals (albeit concurrent data structures may indeed use refcounting internally, and more obviously it comes up when implementing general graph structures). Overall, outside of the use of obligate GC as in Swift, I suspect that nested destructor calls are unlikely to be a significant problem in practice.