Much like in C, you could use several other schemes such as a Mutex (or RwLock). There are crates which implement more complicated memory management primitives

Much like in C, you could use several other schemes such as a Mutex (or RwLock). There are crates which implement more complicated memory management primitives -- the most obvious example being crossbeam[1]. Crossbeam even has an implementation of an epoch-based memory manager[2] which (in very loose terms) amortises the cost of reference counting each object by tracking the epochs of each thread and freeing objects once all threads have moved past the "death time" of an object. [1]: https://docs.rs/crossbeam/ https://docs.rs/crossbeam/ [2]: https://docs.rs/crossbeam/0.7.3/crossbeam/epoch/index.html https://docs.rs/crossbeam/0.7.3/crossbeam/epoch/index.html