Not really. Rust has an idea of "borrowing" references to things, which could be seen as increasing the reference count, but it's not a particularly good analog

Not really. Rust has an idea of "borrowing" references to things, which could be seen as increasing the reference count, but it's not a particularly good analogy because borrows actually have no effect on the original lifetime. So, if you borrow something and try to store it somewhere with a lifetime the compiler thinks is going to outlive the lifetime of the thing you borrowed, that's a compiler error, whereas in a reference counted language or a GCed language the original entity just keeps existing for as long as required. This is usually because said entity is on the heap - Rust puts everything on the stack by default. You can of course put things on the heap, and there is a selection of types available in the standard library which are I guess a bit like C++ smart pointers that let you have heap allocation, reference-counted semantics etc. if you want it.