Wow, I can't believe I have been reading up lately on official Rust documentation and still I was under the impression that Rust had optional GC. Thanks for sorting me out...
Well, I think is sort of does when you use the Rc types, right? It's just much more explicit than a type modifier, it's a type wrapper that requires requires some level of additional code ornamentation in some instances when using later as well. It's just not really any different than using a library in C++ that offers the same, except that in Rust's case the library is part of the stdlib.
