Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by manwe150 389 days ago
> we are guaranteed that when we don't need this Goat the clean-up-unused-goat code we wrote will run now

Not to put too fine a point on things, but rust (and c++) very explicitly don’t guarantee this. They are both quite explicit about being allowed to leak memory and never free it (due to reference cycles), something a GC is not typically allowed to do. So yes it usually happens, it just is not guaranteed.
2 comments
Maxatar 389 days ago
Your point that reference counting can result in memory leaks is absolutely correct and a worthwhile point. However, it's also worth pointing out that tracing garbage collectors like those used by Java are also allowed to leak memory and never free it. In the most extreme scenario you have the epsilon garbage collector, which leaks everything:

https://openjdk.org/jeps/318

Implementing a garbage collector that is guaranteed to free memory when it's actually no longer needed is equivalent to solving the halting problem (via Rice's theorem), and so any garbage collection algorithm is going to have to leak some memory, it's simply unavoidable.

link
tialaramex 389 days ago
All you're getting to is that we're not obliged in Rust to ever decide we didn't need the Goat - but I didn't argue that we are.

The "finalizer problem" in the Garbage Collected languages isn't about a Goat which never becomes unused, it's about a situation where the Goat is unused but the clean-up never happens.

link
j_seigh 384 days ago
You used quotes so I can't tell if you think it's a real problem or just a self inflicted one because the warning that finalizers aren't guaranteed to run was ignored.

If the finalizer was for an object that is just memory, it's not a problem. The GC has decided it doesn't need to recover the memory used by that object just yet. I've seen this with heaps defined to be large enough to handle a memory spike. When the spikes stop happening, a lot of stuff in the old gen pool just stays there. At one point I was looking at 50GB heap dumps looking for memory leaks.

It is a problem when the object has non memory resources like a socket descriptor. You can run out of descriptors. So not relying on GC and using try with resource is a good idea.

link