In general yes, but not if you are disciplined.

I’d put it this way: though the idea of ref counting felt very natural at the beginning for my use case, at some point I realized there were probably better techniques to achieve the same goal. I found myself multiple times writing nonsense like:

sum = value_add(v1, v2) mul = value_mul(sum, v3) [...] value_release(sum) value_release(mul)

so that later I could release the sum. When you only have one intermediate value it’s still acceptable, but at 3-4 it starts getting cumbersome.

After asking for feedback, someone rightfully pointed out that the better and faster approach for an autograd engine is using an arena allocator. My reason for saying “rightfully” is that arenas are ideal when you have many “objects” that have the same lifespan, such as the values involved in the forward/backward pass. RC is better when you have a lot of “objects” with independent lifespans.