On Saturday, 4 February 2017 at 15:23:53 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Saturday, 4 February 2017 at 12:56:55 UTC, osa1 wrote:
- Automatic but conservative. Can leak at any time.
All GCs are prone to leak, including precise ones. The point of
garbage collection is not to prevent leaks, but rather to
prevent use-after-free bugs.
No, the main point of GC is to prevent leaks in the case where
you have circular references.
Precise GCs don't leak, by definition. If the object is reachable
then it isn't a leak.
Now, you might claim that objects that provably won't be touched
again should be classified as dead and freed and that this is a
bug that exhibit the same behaviour as a leak (running out of
memory). But it's really nothing like the leaks you experience
with manual memory management (e.g. circular references
preventing memory from being released in a reference counting
management scheme)
