This is a super-well-known issue with reference counting in general. It would be something to deal with anywhere one uses reference counting exclusively. For ex

This is a super-well-known issue with reference counting in general. It would be something to deal with anywhere one uses reference counting exclusively. For example, this is a problem in Swift as well: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/automaticreferencecounting/#Strong-Reference-Cycles-Between-Class-Instances https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr... Does that mean Swift is unsafe? No. All this does is create the potential for a memory leak. Which is nowhere close to being in the same category as a buffer overflow exploit. Also, I suppose one could write a garbage-collected pointer library for Rust, which adds cycle detection (and auto-deletion) on top of ARC.