[nly]

This is because delete is an operator that can be overridden, and whether it has been overridden isn't known until link time.

    void operator delete(void*) {  }

    int main()
    {
      int on_stack;
      int& ref = on_stack;
      int* ptr = &ref;
      delete ptr;
      return 0;
    }

and now it's safe :P... and yes, never freeing any memory is arguably a perfectly valid memory management strategy. Ok, this example is nuts... but it's a feature of C++, in the C tradition, that it lets you do crazy things. Can I plug custom per-type memory allocators in to Rust?