I don't think you've understood the nature of the borrow checker in Rust. It doesn't add any extra runtime behaviour, in fact you could compile Rust code without running these checks (though I don't think rustc provides you with a way to do so). Rust's memory management tools are no different from C++: you have stack allocated structures with destructors, which the standard library uses to implement heap-allocated smart pointers, shared pointers, mutex guards, etc, and you can hand out pointers to any of these. The only difference in rust is it checks how these pointers get handed out so you don't get use-after-free, data races, etc.