The designers and implementors are just using standard terminology in the field. In both cases where the concept applies, the underlying objects are being refe

The designers and implementors are just using standard terminology in the field. In both cases where the concept applies, the underlying objects are being reference counted, with counts being atomically incremented/decremented to allow for thread safety. Swift builds the behaviour into the language runtime for objects where the behaviour applies, while Rust eschews language runtimes and provides it as an explicit wrapper structure in its standard library.