Comment by kbolino

1 day ago

But what does "heap my_heap_var" actually mean, without a garbage collector? Who owns "my_heap_var" and when does it get deallocated? What does explicitly writing out the heap-ness of a variable ultimately provide, that Rust's existing type system with its many heap-allocated types (Box, Rc, Arc, Vec, HashMap, etc.) doesn't already provide?

1 comment

kbolino

alfiedotwtf 7 hours ago

> What does explicitly writing out the heap-ness of a variable ultimately provide, that Rust's existing type system with its many heap-allocated types (Box, Rc, Arc, Vec, HashMap, etc.) doesn't already provide?

To be honest, I was thinking more in terms of cognitive overload i.e. is all that Box boilerplate even needed if we were to treat all `heap my_heap = …” as box underneath? In other words, couldn’t we elide all that away:

    let foo = Box::new(MyFoo::default ());

Becomes:

    heap foo = MyFoo::default();

Must nicer!