[bilboa]

While you may not have to directly call malloc and free in Rust, the memory management still feels very manual compared to a language with GC. When I want to pass an object around I have to decide whether to pass a &_, a Box<_>, Rc<_>, or Rc<RefCell<_>>, or a &Rc<RefCell<_>>, etc. And then there are lifetime parameters, and having to constantly be aware of relative lifetimes of objects. Those are all manual decisions related to memory management that you have to constantly make in Rust that you wouldn't need to think about in Go or Python or Java.

Similarly, idiomatic modern C++ rarely needs new and delete calls, but I'd still say it has manual memory management.

I suppose it's reasonable to talk about degrees of manual-ness, and say that memory management in Rust or modern C++ is less manual than C, but more manual than Go/Python/Java.