Hi Barry We've met before. Nice to meet you again, this time electronically. You suggested that is a different problem that needs a solution. To help maintain focus, I won't respond to that now. You wrote:
I'd argue that the ref counts are not interesting at all, only a side effect of one possible solution to the object life time problem.
I'm happy for you to regard multi-core reference counting (MCRC) as a toy problem, which won't become part of useful software. We can learn a lot by understanding a good toy. Einstein was fascinated by the compass, and the spinning top is surprisingly deep. https://www.johnshepler.com/articles/einstein.html https://www.einsteinscompass.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrocompass Of course, I hope you won't mind if MCRC turns out to useful. -- Jonathan