Weak memory isn't related to weak pointers. What you're referring to is actually pretty easy to deal with (well, not easy, it's pretty tedious to prove in most

Weak memory isn't related to weak pointers. What you're referring to is actually pretty easy to deal with (well, not easy, it's pretty tedious to prove in most of the individual cases, but it's not conceptually difficult). Weak memory refers to atomic operations with weak consistency (like relaxed, release-acquire, and perhaps most confoundingly consume). Modeling them along with lifetimes and ownership tracking requires a fairly sophisticated language model with lots of intermediate tokens and ghost state, which would be a tremendous burden to include in a programming language. Fortunately, it looks like most features of safe Rust extend straightforwardly to weak memory models, but that isn't always the case for unsafe Rust.