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A comment on Ask HN: Rust or Swift for system programming?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Rust or Swift for system programming? by pcwalton on Monday July 04, 2016 @09:01PM (#12033838)
> but they still result in code being inserted to do things like deallocate objects at run time.

We're not talking about whether the user manually calls free. Even C has automatic memory management (via stack/activation records) by that definition! The difference is whether the memory management is worked out statically, at compile time, or runtime, via tracing and/or reference counting.

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Re:Ask HN: Rust or Swift for system programming? by winstonewert on Monday July 04, 2016 @10:36PM (#12034103)
Actually, yes, I think a lot of people would define automatic memory management as not having to manually call free.

C does manage some memory automatically. But it leaves a lot of memory management up to the user, such that any non-trivial C program will manually manage memory. That's different from Rust, Go, Java, or D in that most programs in those languages will not need to do that.

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