Borrow checking, escape analysis, and the generational hypothesis
There’s a fairly common argument that pops up on programming forums, and it’s about the nature of what “garbage collection” means. In the research world, this is what GC means:
Garbage collection (GC), also known as automatic memory management, is the automatic recycling of dynamically allocated memory(2). Garbage collection is performed by a garbage collector which recycles memory that it can prove will never be used again. Systems and languages which use garbage collection can be described as garbage-collected.
Historically, there has been two major forms of GC: reference counting, and tracing. The argument happens because, with the rise of tracing garbage collectors in many popular programming languages, for many programmers, “garbage collection” is synonymous with “tracing garbage collection.” For this reason, I’ve been coming around to the term “automatic memory management”, as it doesn’t carry this baggage.
Manual memory management requires more work than garbage collected. Its a trade off of course to be more performant or use lower resources. When and where should Rust be used or not used according to you?
