Like I wrote, references could be managed with shims (basically a getter-setter interface per-referenced-value-type that's then implemented per-target type) and yes it'd be a painfully "expensive" variation, but for 90% of the cases those can probably be rewritten by a compiler to an inlined variation without those performance penalties.

My argument is that, code that goes on the web-side mostly would adhere to the subset, many of the ref-cases can be statically compiled away and what remains is infrequent enough that for most users it'll be a major win compared to avoid lugging along the GC,etc.