[Animats]

Exactly. C programming has three big questions: "How big is it", "who releases it", and "who locks it". The language gives little help with any of those issues. C++ tries to address all three, but the mechanisms were all painfully retrofitted using templates and they leak.

In the example in the article, "is_origin(point)", the code for which is not shown, is clearly bogus. A function that's just a predicate should not consume its input. It should use read-only access by reference.

One big advantage of Rust is that, because the ownership checking is safe, you don't have to make copies of things just to simplify memory allocation control. In some C++ GUI libraries, strings are copied again and again to prevent memory allocation errors. Rust should be more efficient. It's going to be interesting to see if Servo puts a dent in browser memory consumption. It's insane that browsers now can need more than 1GB of RAM. There have to be multiple copies of the same data.

[pcwalton]

> It's going to be interesting to see if Servo puts a dent in browser memory consumption. It's insane that browsers now can need more than 1GB of RAM. There have to be multiple copies of the same data.

Most of a browser's memory consumption usually consists of JS and DOM objects. In effect, the pages you're visiting are actually doing the bulk of the allocations, not your browser.

[Manishearth]

Though each DOM object might be smaller for us. Maybe.

Gecko has troubles with leaking the DOM because it CCs the DOM. We don't need to worry about that since Spidermonkey's GC manages the Servo DOM, too.