To my understanding, Swift wasn't public for a long time. The idea behind requiring a special syntax for interpolation is that it's supposed to be more clear as to do you really want interpolation, or do you not actually want it. I'm :/ about the interpolation syntax right now. One thing I wanted to avoid is telling people "oh no your string never terminated."
You're right about reference counting being able to pause. But that's something you're more able to control. If you're doing game dev, you can say "I won't assign to references that might be big" during frame critical code.
With garbage collection, you're more or less "Run the gc before, hope it doesn't trigger during that critical spot." or the alternative of fiddling with the gc/manually firing it off so it doesn't stop your world when it's a bad time to stop the world.
You're right about reference counting being able to pause. But that's something you're more able to control. If you're doing game dev, you can say "I won't assign to references that might be big" during frame critical code.
With garbage collection, you're more or less "Run the gc before, hope it doesn't trigger during that critical spot." or the alternative of fiddling with the gc/manually firing it off so it doesn't stop your world when it's a bad time to stop the world.