An interesting design choice of Austral is the use of second-class references [0] in place of first-class references like Rust does. This makes the implementation of a borrow checker simpler at the cost of reduced expressiveness. Hylo (previously Val) [1] tries also to find a way of avoiding first-class references using value semantic and subscripts.

[0] https://borretti.me/article/second-class-references; [1] https://www.hylo-lang.org/