People get confused when they hear that Rust is 'related to ML' and has Refs, but Rust Refs have nothing to do with ML Refs: ML Refs are mutable pointers to immutable data, Rust Refs are pointers to data mutated in-place.
Reference counting is not 'Rust memory management' it's a well-known technique with well-known problems, and Rust doesn't bring anything new to the table here.
All the core decisions are the same as in C++:
- RAII
- Lock-based concurrency
- In-place mutation
People get confused when they hear that Rust is 'related to ML' and has Refs, but Rust Refs have nothing to do with ML Refs: ML Refs are mutable pointers to immutable data, Rust Refs are pointers to data mutated in-place.
Reference counting is not 'Rust memory management' it's a well-known technique with well-known problems, and Rust doesn't bring anything new to the table here.
Edit: RIAA -> RAII