I’ve been programming for decades, though usually for myself, not as a profession. My current go-to language is Python, but I’m thinking of learning either Swift (I’m currently on the Apple ecosystem), or Rust. Which one do you think will be the best in terms of machine learning support in a couple of years and how easy is it to build MacOS/ iOS apps on Rust?

  • aggelalex@lemmy.world
    9·
    1 year ago

    I think you don’t know what garbage collection is. Allocations and Deallocations is how the heap works in memory, and is one of the two main structures in it, the stack being the other one. No matter what language you are using, you cannot escape the heap, except if you don’t use a modern multitasking OS. ARC is a type of garbage collection that decides when to free a reference after it is allocated (malloc), by counting how many places refer to it. When it reaches 0, it frees the memory (free). With ARC you don’t know when a reference will be freed on compile time.

    In Rust, the compiler makes sure, using the Borrow checker, that there is only one place in your entire program where a reference can be freed, so that it can insert the free call at that place AT COMPILE TIME. That way, when the program runs there is no need for a garbage collection scheme or algorithm to take care of freeing up unused resources in the heap. Maybe you thought the borrow checker runs at compile time, taking care of your references, but that’s not the case, the borrow checker is a static analysis phase in the Rust compiler (rustc). If you want to use a runtime borrow checker, it exists, it’s called RefCell, but it’s not endorsed to use. Plus, when you use RefCell, you also usually use Reference Counting (Rc RefCell)

    • 257m
      1·
      1 year ago

      Perhaps garbage collection is the wrong term to use as it dosen’t happen at runtime (I wasn’t sure what other term to call what Rust does). But Rust does provide a abstraction over manual manual memory management and if you are experienced with Rust sure you can probably visualize where the compiler would put the malloc and free calls so it is kind of a mix where you do technically have control it is just hidden from you.

      Edit: It seems the term is just compile-time garbage collection so maybe you could consider it falling under garbage collection as an umbrella term.