You'll have to take the word of the people aiming rust, really. Refcounted pointers are just one option in rust. ~Obviously~ you can use anything from C-style

You'll have to take the word of the people aiming rust, really. Refcounted pointers are just one option in rust. ~Obviously~ you can use anything from C-style pointers and your own custom allocator that calls brk() directly to atomically refcounted and/or mutexed threadsafe smartpointers to manage your memory.