Right Java made GC popular. And right now Rust is making reference counting, borrow-owner popular. This is what I am observing.

That languages get popular is no surprise. But what was a little bit surprising for me was that the tech the language uses gets spread and popular all over -- outside of that language as long as that language stays popular.

I right now am think automatic reference counting is the way to go. In a sense C++ RAII is also ARC. But a compiler level support is better.