Comment by freakynit

> Im more interested to know the points in relation to autofree.

As sibling said, autofree is still stated to use a GC, which obviously disqualifies it from "memory safety without GC".

> Regarding the details, here is a pretty informative github discussion thread on same topic: https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/17419

I did see that! Unfortunately it doesn't really move the needle on anything I said earlier. It describes manual memory management as an alternative to the GC when using autofree (which obviously isn't conducive to reliable memory safety barring additional guardrails not described in the post) and arenas are only mentioned, not discussed in any real detail.

> It is also accompanied with a demo video (pretty convincing in case you would like to watch).

Keep in mind the context of this conversation: whether V offers memory safety without GC or manual memory management. Strictly speaking, a demonstration that autofree works in one case is not sufficient to show V is memory safe without GC/manual memory management, as said capability is a property over all programs that can be written in a language. As a result, thoroughly describing how V supposedly achieves memory safety without a GC/manual memory management would be far more convincing than showing/claiming it works in specific cases.

As an example of what I'm trying to say, consider a similar video but with a leak/crash-free editor written in C. I doubt anyone would consider that video convincing proof that C is a memory-safe language; at most, it shows that memory-safe programs can be written in C, which is a very different claim.

As read in quote given by GP, `autofree` partially uses a GC. And is WIP. (Although was supposedly production-ready 5+ years ago.)

Reading "Memory safe; No garbage collector, no manual memory management" on Rue homepage made me think of V for this very reason. Many think is trivial to do it and Rust has been in wrong for 15 years with its "overcomplicated" borrow checking. It isn't.