[tialaramex]

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.

[j_seigh]

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.