It is useful to provide a "reference counted allocation" API that can
add reference counting semantics to any memory allocation. This allows
turning data structures that usually are placed on the stack into memory
that can be placed on the heap without:

 - adding a public reference count field
 - implementing copy/free semantics

This mechanism is similar to Rust's Rc<Box<T>> combination of traits,
and uses a Valgrind-friendly overallocation mechanism to store the
reference count into a private data segment, like we do with GObject's
private instance data.