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Compile-time checking of owned and borrowed references was in Vala, a C#-inspired language for the GNOME ecosystem, four years earlier.

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Doesn't Vala use reference counting? [1] I'm not actually sure; do you have some pointers I could read here?

1: http://www.vala-project.org/doc/vala/Overview.html#Memory_ma...

From what I remember, it just uses GLib's system for implementing reference-counted pointers in C and is equivalent to using Rc<T> or Arc<T> everywhere in Rust.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Which is very different than most Rust code!

Yes, but so does Rust. Reference counting is orthogonal to, although related to, to borrow checking.

Vala's wiki has a page all about its ownership mechanism: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Ownership

Rust does not use reference counting for ownership, or borrow checking. It is true that you can introduce it for your own types though, with Rc/Arc. That's not really "rust using" it though; it's just a library.

Thanks for the link, I'll dig in!

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