[steveklabnik]

You're a little off.

To put it in Rust terms, the "automatic" means that Swift will insert the equivalent of calls to ".clone()" for you, whereas this is manual in Rust.

[corank]

I see.

My understanding is that Rust doesn't have _automatic_ reference counting as in Swift only because it has an alternative (move), which requires the programmer to specify their intent. The principle is nevertheless the same: ensure every time a reference is copied the ref count is incremented, free only when ref count is zero, and we get temporal memory safety.

[steveklabnik]

It is true that the idea is memory safety in both cases, absolutely.