> There's no confusion between what a borrow checker and a GC do There is, with Rust you cannot extend the lifetime of an object by keeping a reference to it,

> There's no confusion between what a borrow checker and a GC do There is, with Rust you cannot extend the lifetime of an object by keeping a reference to it, when this is exactly the kind of things that will happen (and cause leaks) with GC. > this looks like hand-rolled pointers using vecs as one option fairly frequently Emphasis mine. Idk where you got the idea that was something frequent, but while it is an option that's on the table in order to manage data with cyclic references and is indeed used by a bunch of crate doing this kind of stuff, it's never something you'd have to use in practice. (I say that as someone who's been writing Rust for ten years in every possible set-up, from embedded to front-end web, and who's been teaching Rust at university).