Blending borrowing and reference counting without the crashes! June 28, 2026  —  Ante has taken the first step towards something we all thought was impossible: blending reference counting and borrow checking without run-time crashes. 0 This is very promising, because it means that someday, we can more easily use each approach when it makes sense without risking crashes. If there was a language like that, I could prototype a game in a flexible way with reference-counting, and gradually migrate it to faster borrow-checked code. 1 No mainstream language has figured out how to combine them seamlessly, even though many have tried. Rust tried, but when we try to use Rust's reference-counting Rc type, it often requires RefCell (like Rc<RefCell<Spaceship>> ) which can crash at run-time if you hold it wrong. 2 3 I wish rustc could check for proper Rc usage at compile-time!…