Re:D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC
by timlyo on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @12:37PM
(#14605340)
What's the use case for a garbage collector in rust?
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Re:D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC
by yorwba on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @01:38PM
(#14606059)
If you have to share some data across your program and can't determine the lifetime at compilation time, you can't simply rely on the Rust compiler for memory management.
The next option is to use reference counting by wrapping your data in Rc/Arc (depending on whether you need atomicity or not).
But that can still leak memory if you have cyclic data structures and can't break the cycle with Weak pointers.
At this point, what you need is a garbage collector.