Yeah, the error is on my part. Meant to say 'ARC is like a super primitive GC'. It gives a very small amount of automatism over manually freeing memory, but must be done by hand.
It's a super primitive in a same way an abacus is a super primitive computer.
Yeah, no, you aren't helping your case at all. ARC is, again, not like a super primitive GC. And it most certainly is not "done by hand". That completely contradicts the "Automated" part of "Automated Reference Counting".
Yeah, no - is a very bad linguistic form. Try to avoid it. I speak from experience.
Also, it is like a super primitive GC, in that it's a much more primitive and much more performant automatic memory management system (like GC). It's just a different level of abstraction we're talking here.
It's no different than saying how is polygon is like a super primitive circle.
GC and ARC are two very different approaches to memory management. Neither is more "primitive" than the other. They have different characteristics, different goals, different strengths & weaknesses.
It's a super primitive in a same way an abacus is a super primitive computer.