Chapter 5 of the GC Handbook, one of the major CS references in GC algorithms.

Reference counting is a GC algorithm, regardless how people sell it to the man on the street.

Additionally there is a whole set of politics how ARC had to be sold after the technical failure to make Objective-C GC implementation work without core dumps, due to the underlying C semantics.

Plus making retain/release calls automatic wasn't anything new as idea, VB and Delphi did it first with COM AddRef/Release.

Swift doesn't have tracing gc but ref counting is a form of gc