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Comment by bluegatty

4 days ago

It's not ARC though. They use fancy threading mechanisms to avoid having to check on every access. Much faster.

It is still primarily ARC. There's simply some optimizations in place, but still no real GC. So you'll never get those dreaded pauses at runtime. It COULD be a real rust competitor if a couple issues were addressed, mostly devx (in the standard tooling sense not the misuse of term this article has, meaning expressiveness, correctness, etc. which Swift already has in spades)

"Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to track and manage your app’s memory usage."

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

  • I meant 'not like rust-Arc' :)

    ... which is what I thought people were referring to.

    Yes - it's ref counting, but it's not like 'Arc' at all - ARC is way more thread aware and most 'access' doesn't have to do thread checking. Much faster.

    So - using Rust 'Arc' would not be at all like using Swift 'ARC' in the end.