I will say that you seem to be stating "smearing that over total execution time tends to give better results" without proof as well. I certainly don't think using atomic operations everywhere and converting every pointer read operation into a write operation is efficient. Yes RC has smaller minheap sizes than tracing GC, but garbage collection is fundamentally a time-space tradeoff and RC is highly optimized for memory efficiency. Also most naive RC implementations don't copy objects so you get heap fragmentation.
Comparing naive RC to tracing GC is non-trivial. In order to have a fair comparison, you'd have to implement naive RC and tracing GC in the same system and then compare them across a set of benchmarks. I personally have never come across a great performance study which compared naive RC to tracing GC.
Comparing naive RC to tracing GC is non-trivial. In order to have a fair comparison, you'd have to implement naive RC and tracing GC in the same system and then compare them across a set of benchmarks. I personally have never come across a great performance study which compared naive RC to tracing GC.