Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection
by mafribe on Thursday May 09, 2019 @03:48AM
(#19866202)
Am I wrong ...
Yes.
Unless your memory is infinite. Rust also automatically deallocates memory that is no longer used, so it's some kind of GC, but one where the point of deallocation is either statically determined (based on nesting of life-times) or dynamically (using reference-counting). The problem with static dealloc is that the compiler cannot always work out when memory becomes free and must make conservative approximations (see Rice's theorem [1]), the problem with ref-counting is circular data structures (and also the cost in space and time and synchronisation across threads of maintaining an index).
Unless your memory is infinite. Rust also automatically deallocates memory that is no longer used, so it's some kind of GC, but one where the point of deallocation is either statically determined (based on nesting of life-times) or dynamically (using reference-counting). The problem with static dealloc is that the compiler cannot always work out when memory becomes free and must make conservative approximations (see Rice's theorem [1]), the problem with ref-counting is circular data structures (and also the cost in space and time and synchronisation across threads of maintaining an index).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem