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by SpaceNugget 439 days ago
(Atomic) Reference Counted structs. They count their own references, there is no external mechanism tracking all of the reference counts at runtime. Modern rust does not include a garbage collector. You might be confusing a garbage collector with the general concept of memory management, which is a feature of (AFAIK) every high level language. Many C projects also have reference counted structs, but a reference count and a call to malloc/free doesn't quite qualify as garbage collection to most developers.
1 comments
rc00 439 days ago
You might be confusing "garbage collector" and "garbage collection" and Rust definitely has the latter. Reference counting is also a subset of garbage collection. That is a matter of fact, not opinion. See below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_s...

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SpaceNugget 433 days ago
I might be wrong, but I think you took offence to me suggesting you might be confused. If so, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it in a negative way, I was trying to soften my language but I phrased it badly.

Regardless, my point was that Rust _the language_ does not provide garbage collection. The Arc/Rc structs are where the reference counting is implemented. You can create reference counted objects in C, like GObjects in GLib. However, I think you would agree with most people that C does not have garbage collection. Otherwise the concept of a language having or not having garbage collection is diluted to the point of meaninglessness. At that point I think memory management is a more apt term.

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rc00 433 days ago
> Regardless, my point was that Rust _the language_ does not provide garbage collection.

These are language features not dependencies or external libraries. Maybe the best phrasing is that Rust's garbage collection features are opt-in, similar to the same features being opt-out for Go, Nim, OCaml, and others.

GLib is an external library to C and C's standard library. Arc/Rc (and there are other types of garbage collection within Rust _the language_) are language features since they are built-in types.

The delineation is very clear here. If it is part of the language's standard features and/or standard library then it is part of the language. Using opt-in/opt-out terminology also make clear how the garbage collection features are available. In Rust, you opt into garbage collection by using specific built-in types.

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