How is this helping us go anywhere worth going?
I was talking about std::shared_ptr, which is the closest thing to reference counting that STL offers.
My post above was about how C++ smart-pointers compare favorably to Rust's oft-considered-"unique" ownership/borrowing system. The particular STL features that cause equivalent "compile-time magic" to happen to what you get from Rust's semantics, are those of std::uniq_ptr and std::move, not those of std::shared_ptr. So the value (or lack thereof) of std::shared_ptr, isn't really a knock against the value of the C++ STL smart-pointers collection as a whole—you can entirely ignore the existence of std::shared_ptr (I do!) and still think C++ STL smart-pointers are the cat's pyjamas.