And here you’re only talking about a subset of memory leaks, by inaccessible memory. You can also leak memory by pushing new elements in a channel while never reading them for example.
You are absolutely correct that rusts safety features don’t extend to memory leaks, but it’s still better than most garbage collected languages unless you abuse Rc or something, and it does give you quite fine-grained controll over lifetimes, copying and allocations on the heap which in practice means that rust is fairly good about memory leakages compared to most languages.
How would rust fare any better then a tracing GC? Realistically I’d expect them to use more memory, and also have worse determinism in memory management - but I fail to really see a case where rust would prevent memory leaks and GC languages wouldn’t.
There’s built in functions to leak memory that are perfectly safe. You can also do one really trivially by making a reference count cycle. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-06-reference-cycles.html
Rust only prevents memory unsafety - and memory leaks are perfectly safe. It’s use after frees, double frees, etc. It prevents.
And here you’re only talking about a subset of memory leaks, by inaccessible memory. You can also leak memory by pushing new elements in a channel while never reading them for example.
You are absolutely correct that rusts safety features don’t extend to memory leaks, but it’s still better than most garbage collected languages unless you abuse Rc or something, and it does give you quite fine-grained controll over lifetimes, copying and allocations on the heap which in practice means that rust is fairly good about memory leakages compared to most languages.
How would rust fare any better then a tracing GC? Realistically I’d expect them to use more memory, and also have worse determinism in memory management - but I fail to really see a case where rust would prevent memory leaks and GC languages wouldn’t.
Reference counting is a GC though ?
It’s a bad one sure and will leak memory in cases of a cycle which most tracing GC are able to do.
It’s main advantage is that there are no GC pauses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_counting