Not stupid at all, and something that a lot of people ask. It's not really like that - with reference counting you sort of have multiple 'owners' of a variable

Not stupid at all, and something that a lot of people ask. It's not really like that - with reference counting you sort of have multiple 'owners' of a variable, and they all get to 'free' that memory except that 'free' just decrements a counter. With rust there is a very clear owner at all points - you always know that your code in one spot owns the memory, and no other code does. There may be references handed out but those are very clearly distinct - that is, by looking at the code you can see "yes, I own this" or "yes, I'm borrowing this". Now, with borrowing it's a little bit more like reference counting, but it's really just scope based. We know that the references are valid for some scope, and after that scope they are not. There's no internal counting or anything like that in the compiler as far as I am aware.