> IMO Reference counting and cloning should be the exception, not the rule, and I'd go as far as saying that if you find yourself cloning and boxing data all ov

> IMO Reference counting and cloning should be the exception, not the rule, and I'd go as far as saying that if you find yourself cloning and boxing data all over the place in your Rust application you're either working on a very atypical application or you're doing it somewhat wrong. I strongly disagree. For example, I'm working on a project that shells out to a command line program to get a graph structure, and then computes things based on that structure. I want the code that traverses the graph to be efficient, but a handful of clones is trivial compared to opening a subprocess. In my case the clones are in the constant part of the big O. Sometimes clones can let you have a more efficient algorithm as well. Reference counting is pervasive in async primitives, and (for very specific io-bound usecases) async can sometimes be more efficient. It comes down to knowing your domain, althorighms, data, constraints, etc. and picking the right choice. I don't think you can say Arc is always a sign of a mediocre programmer. I've never programmed embedded, but it makes sense that you've got strong memory constraints. One thing I like about Rust though is that there's a strong culture that just because you have to walk uphill through the snow on a tiny device doesn't mean you get to look down on those of us who get to run our code on a server.