Which essentially goes at the cost of having Java-style semantic memory leaks (very generally, _any_ kind of keeping-an-object-as-long-as-at-least-one-reference-exists suffers from it) => we still have to pick our poison (personally, I _strongly_ prefer to avoid refcounting, and it does work like a charm in a few very serious million-LoC/billions-transactions projects, but I do agree that opinions may differ).
Rust references work the opposite way. References don't extend the lifetime of their source, and a reference outliving its referent is a compile-time error.
> we still have to pick our poison (personally, I _strongly_ prefer to avoid refcounting, and it does work like a charm in a few very serious million-LoC/billions-transactions projects, but I do agree that opinions may differ).
I have no idea what the hell you're talking about, but you seem to suffer from pretty significant misunderstandings.
P.S. FWIW, Rust's references ~= OP's "naked pointers" (NOT 'soft pointers'), and SaferCPP's 'scoped pointers'. A useful tool, but is not sufficient in quite a few real-world use cases.