this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (34 children)

That sounds pretty great. My impression is that relatively little code actually runs that often.

but with none of the footguns of manual memory management, no garbage collection pauses, but yet also no evil stepparent style borrow checker to be beaten by.

That part sounds implausible, though. What kind of memory management are they doing?

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (33 children)

Reference counting.

They pay a lot of attention to preventing cache misses and branch prediction failures, which is how they get away with reference counting and still being fast.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 4 months ago (28 children)

Oh, you just mean it's a kind of garbage collection that's lighter on pauses. Sorry, I've had the "my pre-Rust pet language already does what Rust does" conversation on here too many times.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, the drop/dealloc "pause" is very different from what people usually mean when they say "garbage collection pause", i.e. stop-the-world (...or at least a slice of the world).

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it might be better, I don't actually know. It's not as novel as OP maybe thinks it is, though.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's fair; Python, Swift, and most Lisps all use or have previously used reference-counting. But the quoted sentence isn't wrong, since it said no "garbage collection pauses" rather than "garbage collection."

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yes, I read or interpreted that wrong at first.

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