Gah, can't believe I forgot about functional programming languages here :(

> even though Rust fans now adopted this claim

Did they? Rust's references seem pretty pointer-like to me on the scale of "has pointers" to "pointers have been entirely removed from the language".

(Obviously Rust has actual pointers as well, but since usefully using them requires unsafe I assume they're out of scope here)

What I meant is that Rust has stricter aliasing rules which make some optimization possible without extra annotations, but this is balanced out by many other issues.