[slaymaker1907]

I think most of the difficulty people experience is when they try to naïvely use references anywhere they would normally use a pointer. That mostly works for functions, but this ends up getting really confusing and difficult for data objects. Instead, people should really be using things like Rc<T> which makes certain patterns much simpler. People seem to have this ridiculous notion that using Rc<T> or heaven forbid Rc<Box<T>> is going to make their code slow, but in reality it can greatly simplify code at minimal performance cost when used places that references would get complex. People generally don't say Swift is slow, but it uses reference counting all over the place.

[lll-o-lll]

People do say that Swift is slow though, and it has a whole bunch of optimisations to ensure the RC is elided whenever possible.

[pornel]

There are two differences from Swift:

1. You don't need to refcount everything. In Swift objects have to be refcounted and heap allocated. In Rust you only use it selectively in cases where shared ownership is really necessary, and otherwise still have an option of using exclusive ownership, value types, etc.

2. You can still borrow Rc's contents locally and use it as a plain reference, so hot loops and leaf functions don't pay the price. Often you may need to touch the refcount only once when building a data structure or passing data to a closure, and then on use it via a temporary reference. In Swift the refcount is updated much more often, and there are only limited cases where ARC optimizer can skip it.

[nextaccountic]

Rc<Box<T>> really doesn't make sense (Rc is like a specialized Box), I guess you meant Rc<RefCell<T>>?