Escaping the Tyranny of the GC: std.rcstring, first blood

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 15 September 2014 at 02:26:19 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> The road there is long, but it starts with the proverbial first 
> step.

An unrelated question, but how will reference counting work with 
classes?

I've recently switched my networking library's raw memory wrapper 
to reference counting (previously it just relied on the GC for 
cleanup), and it was going well until I've hit a brick wall.

The thing with reference counting is it doesn't seem to make 
sense to do it half-way. Everything across the ownership chain 
must be reference counted, because otherwise the non-ref-counted 
link will hold on to its ref-counted child objects forever (until 
the next GC cycle).

In my case, the classes in my applications were holding on to my 
reference-counted structs, and wouldn't let go until they were 
eventually garbage-collected. I can't convert the classes to 
structs because I need their inheritance/polymorphism, and I 
don't see an obvious way to refcount classes (RefCounted 
explicitly does not support classes).

Am I overlooking something?