That's an issue when every object is managed. Which is not the case in an unmanaged language, you'd only refcount what you need to refcount. Furthermore Rust c

That's an issue when every object is managed. Which is not the case in an unmanaged language, you'd only refcount what you need to refcount. Furthermore Rust can also safely borrow from a refcounted pointer without the need for refcount traffic, which can be quite the performance gain for atomic refcounts (it's nigh irrelevant for non-thread-safe refcounts as those just do a local increment/decrement).