this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Programming
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Help me understand your point of view. How does Rust not prevent memory leaks?
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.
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.
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
I think you know what I mean when I contrast Rust with GC'd languages, we can call it opt-in garbage collection if we're being pedantic.