You should know that rust always intended to have owned/shared references, Rc<T> reference counting, and Gc<T> garbage collected pointers. It turns out that LL

You should know that rust always intended to have owned/shared references, Rc<T> reference counting, and Gc<T> garbage collected pointers. It turns out that LLVM made precise garbage collection a hard thing to add on to the language inside of it's standard library. I believe recent changes to LLVM make this easier and it's still a planned feature in the future. It still doesn't really meet your idea you probably have in your head. When people can choose between different types of pointers, people will choose rust's normal lightweight lifetime references 99% of the time. Gc<T> will probably only be used in those rare cases where an object has no clear owner. They figured this out in the early days of rust.