> There's a reason almost no widely used language implementation relies on ref-counting. CPython is the only real exception and they would switch to tracing if they could. They can't because they exposed deterministic finalization to the user which means now their GC strategy is a language "feature" that they're stuck with.

Reference counting and address-semantics (which prohibits moving objects, so even if you work around the refcount, you can only do a tracing GC, but you don't get to compact) are deeply ingrained into CPython's C API as well, which is very widely used.