[pornel]

Rust doesn't have a mark-and-sweep GC. It has "automatic" memory management through static analysis. Rust's memory management is done by the compiler automagically inserting free() in the same places that you would put it manually in C.

[kaba0]

I would add that it inserts free similarly to C++’s RAII, and it also have reference counting wrapper type which will free at runtime. Reference counting makes different tradeoffs to mark-and-sweet GCs, they usually have worse throughput, but better latency (when they are shared between threads, every new/lost reference does an atomic increment/decrement which is very expensive and happens on the working thread. Java’s GC for example can amortize this cost by doing the work almost completely in parallel)

[pornel]

It's not quite RAII, because it's not scope-based. Rust has exclusive ownership with moves by default, so it avoids having a concept of an accessible moved-out-of value that still has to run destructors redundantly.

It's not based on reference counting. It's possible to implement reference counting in user code (like C++ shared_ptr), but that is still notably different than languages that use reference counting as their primary memory management strategy (like Swift or CPython). In Rust reference count increases are manual, and refcounted values can be borrowed and safely passed around without updating the reference count.