Is it possible to introduce Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to C++?

Question

Objective C has introduced a technology called ARC to free the developer from the burden of memory management. It sounds great, I think C++ developers would be very happy if g++

Answer 1

What's the advantage of using ARC rather than full garbage collection? There was a concrete proposal for garbage collection before the committee; in the end, it wasn't handled because of lack of time, but there seems to be a majority of the committee (if not truly a consensus) in favor of adding garbage collection to C++.

Globally, reference counting is a poor substitute for true garbage collection: it's expensive in terms of run time, and it needs special code to handle cycles. It's applicable in specific limited cases, however, and C++ offers it via std::shared_ptr, at the request of the programmer, when he knows it's applicable.