"Agentic driven OSes"? Sounds like AI hype babble.

Hype or not, that is what is being pushed

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/microsof...

https://www.klover.ai/apple-uses-ai-agents-10-ways-to-use-ai...

What does this have to do with system languages with manual memory management going away?

Swift, by design, does not have GC.

Chapter 5,

https://gchandbook.org/contents.html

It would help if all naysayers had their CS skills up to date.

RC is a GC method and the least efficient one.

It's the most predictable and has much less overhead than a moving collector.

Only when we forget about the impact of cycle collections, or domino effects stoping the world when there is a cascade of counters reaching zero.

The optimisatios needed to improve such scenarions, are akin to a poor man's tracing GC implementation.

I didn't forget. That's predictable. It happens when the application code does something, or stops doing something, as opposed to the moving collector just doing it at random times.