Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does Rust deal with long-lived objects that cannot be block-scoped (or request-scoped, in the context of a server for example)? A typical example here would be a UI framework, where memory has to be managed for the window and its widgets, and then the entire application is suspended until the next event. The user can open and close windows in random orders, and so on. Perhaps some windows generate a lot of associ…
It seems like you want a reference-counted pointer: you get shared ownership, and the object is deleted when the last reference to the pointer is deleted. Similar to C++'s std::shared_ptr
Right, but then you take on a bunch of baggage you don’t have in a GC setting. For instance if you want to make zillions of these objects and delete them you are paying overhead for lots of allocations and deallocations made heavier by the reference counting. You pay time overhead for atomic increment/decrement, and if there are cyclic structures then you pay a big price in the code complexity to deal with them properly and not cause memory leaks.