Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _orz_ 701 days ago
Sorry? So obviously with GC one means managed GC. Otherwise the comment above doesn’t make any sense at all since then Rust itself would use GC because it also supports reference counting.

Strictly speaking you could obviously say reference counting is a form of GC. So to avoid GC you then surely recommend people to use C since that, in contrast to Rust, Swift, C++ and many others, really doesn’t use any GC, neither managed nor reference counting based.

1 comments

Reference counting is a form of GC. Saying Swift, or Perl, are not GC’ed would be misleading.

In Rust, reference counting is opt-in for individual objects. It is a necessity for any powerful, low-level language to be able to implement any high-level feature.

You can, after all, also implement reference counting in C.

To avoid GC, you need a language where it’s opt-in. For example C++ or Zig, but not OCaml.