It's still done. It's not uncommon to see that in Rust: fn foo(x: &Arc<T>) …quite literally borrows the count in the refcount-ed thing. I think you can fin

It's still done. It's not uncommon to see that in Rust: fn foo(x: &Arc<T>) …quite literally borrows the count in the refcount-ed thing. I think you can find similar things in CPython, on the C side of things.