> Actually, my memory is that while the language had syntax to declare garbage collected pointers, it wasn't actually hooked up to a proper garbage collector. It was always more of a "we are reserving the syntax and we will hook it up when needed", and it turns out the ownership system was powerful enough that it was never needed.

AFAIK it was just an `Rc`/`Arc` with the possibility of upgrading it to an actual GC in the future.