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Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

> I don't use Rust just because I want to avoid GC.

Go that is?

Hmm, not sure I understand? Re-reading, perhaps my phrasing wasn't clear. What I meant was that I use Rust, and it's not simply because it lacks GC. There are lots of other good reasons too.

To be even clearer: I don't think Rust's value proposition depends on whether you absolutely must avoid GC or not.

Rust has gc, no?

Depends on your Rust implementation. You can have an implementation without one and use it to make, say, an operating system.

There is only one implementation of Rust, and it does not have tracing GC. The language does not include semantics for one, so it would be an extension of the language.

Right. I had that backwards. (I don't program Rust)

> I don't program Rust

If you don't know anything about rust, you shouldn't respond to a question about rust.

Not in the mandatory runtime overhead, cycle collection, or non-deterministic pausing senses of the word.

No, it does not. It does allow you to implement it if you want though: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc

Not really, no. You could implement one with e.g. reference counting, but one is not provided for you by default.

It has reference counting for some of the constructs which is a form of garbage collection and it has runtime overhead. Like shared_ptr in c++.

This is a misleading comment. A Rust program may use reference counting by explicitly wrapping some value in Rc<> or Arc<>; the standard library provides these generic types. There are no "constructs" built in to the language or standard library that require the use of reference counting.

I wrote it's like shared_ptr which is also construct in C++ standard library, what is misleading here? You don't need to use it also in C++ and I did not wrote that you need to use it in Rust also, you disagree with something that I didn't wrote.

PS. Pozdrawiam rodaka.

It has optional RC type.

It had GC as core part of language, about six or more years ago?

No. He is saying he uses rust to avoid GC, but not just to avoid GC.

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