Do you manually manage memory in Rust? Because I just write Vec::new or vec![], just like how I would write new ArrayList in Java.
You can allocate memory for a Vec with Vec::new. Dropping it deallocates. When and where it's dropped is important. Passing ownership around is important. These are parts of managing the memory.
If you need something to be on the heap, you use Box. If you need something to be shared, you use something like Arc or Rc.
Rust makes it nice to implicitly handle the common cases so you don't feel like you're doing manual memory management, but you're making decisions about that memory management at every step of the way.
> This function is not magic; it is literally defined as: pub fn drop<T>(_x: T) {}
This is usually more deterministic than GC languages (no random pauses), but can be less efficient for highly nested data structures. It also makes linked lists impossible without using "unsafe rust", as it doesn't abide by the normal ownership rules.
[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/scope/raii.html [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html
Admittedly not the easiest language to make a linked list in.
It's easy to fall into a trap where your Banana class becomes a GorillaHoldingTheBananaAndTheEntireJungle class(to borrow a phrase from Joe Armstrong), and nothing ever gets freed because everything is always referenced by something else.
Not to mention the dark arts of avoiding long GC pauses etc.
It's possible to do this in rust too, I suppose. The clearest difference is that in rust these things are explicit rather than implicit. To do this in rust you'd have to use 'static, etc. The other distinction is compile-time versus runtime, of course.
You could use 'static, or you can move (partial) ownership of an object into itself with Rc/Arc and locking, causing the underlying counter to never return to 0. It's still very possible to accidentally hold on to a forest.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm struggling to picture a situation in which I have a gorilla I'm currently using, but keeping the banana it's holding and the jungle it's in alive is a bad thing.