In idiomatic Rust code, you typically have very few reference increments/decrements, making it faster and more efficient than both, GC and traditional RC-based approaches.

The reasons for this are that objects are often allocated on the stack, passed by reference (a safe pointer), and directly integrated into a larger structure, requiring fewer heap allocations and very few – if any – refcounted objects. In Rust, unlike C or C++, you can do this safely and ergonomically because Rust enforces clear and well-defined ownership semantics.