Hmm, a more practical approach might be to mirror the GC languages and only permit (not-null) refcounting pointers as elements of dynamic containers such as vectors. Ensuring that all references don't outlive their targets, thereby eliminating the implicit "this" pointer issue. I think. Is that how Rust does it?
No, safe Rust only has safe references, and that includes "this" ("self" in Rust). Because the lifetimes are part of the type, it does not require the runtime overhead of reference counting.
