Re:Rust's 2018 roadmap
by majewsky on Monday March 12, 2018 @01:43PM
(#16569870)
If you have reference counting across GC boundaries, you can easily create memory leaks because of reference cycles, e.g. GC 1 cannot release object 1 because it references object 2, and vice versa. (Unless you only allow refs to go one way.)
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Great now I get flashbacks to 2005.
IE6 had exactly that issue, the DOM was implemented using COM which has its own GC (refcounting) separate from the regular JS runtime.
If you created a cycle between DOM and JS by, let's say, adding an event handler to a DOM node — thankfully that's something you'd never do when developing web pages & applications — you'd start leaking memory which would survive across page reloads.
There was actually a bit of software called Drip, it was just a webview wrapper (technically an MFC app with a browser COM component), you'd launch it, open your page, click the "blow memory" button and it'd reload the page over and over again listing elements which had survived between reloads.