> But real life experience continues to show ref counting doing better.

Hmm... not in my experience at least, for instance Apple's ARC (which should be much better than "dumb" shared_ptr refcounting because the compiler does some static analysis and drops redundant retain/release operations) still can have a shockingly high runtime overhead and requires careful manual tweaking and general handholding to the point where the traditional manual memory management results in simpler code, at least in hot code paths.

Now GCs may well be worse, but performance-wise they really can't be much worse than ARC. ARC may sometimes prevent unpredictable GC spikes, but only by spreading out the same (or worse) cost along the timeline (which is at least something, but many GCs simply haven't been designed for the "prevent spikes" requirement).

There simply is no silver bullet for dynamic memory management, at least if both memory usage and performance matters.