An eager reference-counting garbage collection system performs a static analysis on the intermediate representation of a program. The system then uses liveness information to inject eager reference-counting updates into the program. Through the use of the liveness information, reference-counting decrements can be made earlier in execution than in traditional reference-counting schemes, freeing up memory more efficiently. Additionally, a reference-counting subsumption optimization tool identifies redundant reference-counting updates and removes them, lowering the number of garbage collection update calls and improving execution throughput. Reference-counting subsumption can also be used as a throughput enhancer in traditional reference-counting schemes that maintain up-to-date tallies of references from the stack.