Comment on Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption?

• hairyballs@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  We can go further, I think it’s impossible to prevent memory leaks in a general purpose language

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  • philm@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Not without a super fancy type system that has to be still found. I think the key issue is cyclic data-structures (e.g. doubly-linked list). The language somehow needs to have strong/weak pointers and automatically determining them is a very complex research question…

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• Rin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Help me understand your point of view. How does Rust not prevent memory leaks?

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  • IAm_A_Complete_Idiot@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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. doc.rust-lang.org/…/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.

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    • hairyballs@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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    • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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      • IAm_A_Complete_Idiot@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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 it and GC languages wouldn’t.

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      • Akisamb@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

        en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_counting

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