[burntsushi]

How do you define a leak?

If you sit down and really think about it, I think you'll find that a precise definition of a leak is actually somewhat difficult.

I am nowhere near the first person to make this observation.

I point this out to avoid a big long thread in which we just argue about what the word "leak" means. You could absolutely define "leak" in a way that my example is not a leak. But I prefer a definition in which "leak" does include my example.

I do not care to litigate the definition. If you want to recast my example as a "space" leak instead of a "memory" leak, then I don't object, and I don't think it changes the relevance of my example. (Which I think is absolutely consistent with the context of this thread.) In particular, I don't think "memory leak" in this thread is being used in a very precise manner.

[mercurial]

Short of using a different data structure, I'm not sure how you would get out of that one. The claim was that some of these leaks ("leaks"?) could be avoided by using a language with a GC. As far as I know, most modern languages' equivalent of Vec will do exactly the same thing, GC or not.

[burntsushi]

I was responding to this:

> so leaks are a fact of life in basically every major Rust project I've seen not written by somebody like BurntSushi

And yes, I said I considered their overall argument specious.