By the way, while this statement was true for initial design,
they have recently moved to much more simple model, replacing
most of more complicated pointer types with library solutions.
I think those who refer to Rust example are more likely to have
in mind that new model and your judgement seems to be based on
previous one.
In my opinion the new model is even harder. As you can only put
immutable data in their Gc/Rc structures you end up with things
like Rc<RefMut<Type>> or Rc<Cell<Type>> and must exactly
understand what each of those does. For me already the library
solution in C++ (shared_ptr<Type>) is somewhat annoying to type
when you compare that to the current D solution or other managed
languages. Dereferencing these types in Rust is also very hard at
the moment, but they plan do get it easier.
Freely mixing ARC and GC is also not that easy in my opinion: As
soon as you have a garbage collected object anywhere in your
object hierarchy basically anything beneath that will be also
"garbage collected" - in the sense of only deallocated when the
GC runs. And if you used RAII semantics in some of your ARC
managed objects you might wonder why their resources are not
immediatly releasd, but also when the GC runs.
