Why would you respond to a comment about a topic you don't understand and spread false information? You clearly cannot tell the difference between garbage collected language and smart pointers.
Smart pointers do not necessarily use reference counting. std::shared_ptr is reference counted, but std::unique_ptr is not. Needless to say that std::unique_ptr should always be the default choice and std::shared_ptr only used when actually needed.
like the other comment said, std::unique_ptr is not ref counted. Ref counting is one of the ways to implement garbage collection but it is not garbage collection by itself. C++ does not have garbage collection.
C++ does not have garbage collection in the standard library, just as shared_ptr was not part of the standard library in the past. You can currently have optional garbage collection in C++: https://github.com/pebal/sgcl
