Reference counted smart pointers are more expensive than regular references in rust, but not as expensive as those in C++: Regular Rc pointers live on a single

Reference counted smart pointers are more expensive than regular references in rust, but not as expensive as those in C++: Regular Rc pointers live on a single thread, and so don't have to use atomic increment/decrement like they do in C++. In addition, Rust's support for borrowing means that when passing smart pointers around you typically don't need to increment/decrement the pointer at all - because the compiler statically enforces that the borrowed reference lives for a shorter time than the smart pointer it's borrowed from.