I'm surprised everyone is treating owned and unowned refs as if they were something new. C++ has owned and unowned refs. In C++, they're called "std::unique_ptr" and "dumb pointers." The semantics of the C++ version are almost exactly the same as the semantics of the nim version - the one difference is that in the newruntime, before you release the owned ref, you're required to manually clear out any dangling unowned refs - and it verifies that you have done that. In C++, you're not required to clear out the unowned refs. But, that means that in C++, you can end up with dangling unowned refs.
It would actually be very easy to implement the newruntime's semantics in C++, because C++ smart pointers are very flexible. Anybody could have done this at any time. But anybody considering this would have immediately understood the cost tradeoffs: you pay the performance penalty of maintaining the reference counts, and you pay the price of doing the extra work to clear out the unowned refs. In exchange, any code that would have accessed a dangling ref will access a nil pointer instead - which is better, because it's a caught error. I think it's telling that this is not a common thing to do - perhaps this indicates that most programmers don't consider these tradeoffs worthwhile.
