So imagine the current implementation does a lifetime analysis somewhat similar to Rust, but then where Rust would error out, this implementation simply inserts a runtime refc increase. This gets rid of most runtime refc overhead without the programmer needing to be clever about it.
Then, I intend to add an optional type annotation that gets you the Rust behavior, for those cases where you want maximum control. I don't think its the right default though.
The algorithm is more lenient than Rust, since I don't have any shared memory concurrency for example.
I intend to write up more thorough details about the algorithm, but again, haven't gotten to it.
It does not handle cycles. If you create cycles that you do not manually break, you'll get a cycle report at program exit that prints the kind of values that weren't reclaimed. You're then expected to fix your code accordingly :)