3 ms·

How does this relate to whether or not you plan to mutate things? Wouldn't plain ole counting work for this, regardless of whether or not they're mutable, rath

How does this relate to whether or not you plan to mutate things? Wouldn't plain ole counting work for this, regardless of whether or not they're mutable, rather than what Rust does - allowing multiple readers and no writers, or zero readers and 1 writer?

erik_seaberg 6y ago
Refcounting is GC; it automatically detects at runtime that an object has no references. It also adds a substantial cost that Rust is trying to avoid, often by copying immutable objects (which have better cache locality than random access to refcounts everywhere).
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  I'm not talking about GC. I'm talking about Rust references: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-02-references-and-borrowing.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-02-references-and-borrow... > At any given time, you can have either one mutable reference or any number of immutable references.
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    Oh, I get it, you're suggesting all references could be mutable, but still limited to the lifetime of the object. I guess the downside would be that you can't design an API like iterator invalidation that relies on "some (mutable) methods can't be called while any other (immutable) references exist".
    - comex 6y ago
      It would mean that, once you obtain a derived pointer – say, if you start with a Vec<Foo>, a pointer to Foo that refers to the first element – you would have to throw away that pointer as soon as you made any function call whatsoever. After all, that function call might mutate the Vec<Foo> and cause the backing storage to be reallocated. In practice, this is unworkable enough that it would basically forces you to reference count the Foo, so you could preserve pointers across calls by incrementing the reference count. On the other hand, Rust's approach is suboptimal in cases where you're using reference counting anyway, or are willing to pay the cost of reference counting.

erik_seaberg 6y ago

Refcounting is GC; it automatically detects at runtime that an object has no references. It also adds a substantial cost that Rust is trying to avoid, often by copying immutable objects (which have better cache locality than random access to refcounts everywhere).

bcrosby95 6y ago
I'm not talking about GC. I'm talking about Rust references: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-02-references-and-borrowing.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-02-references-and-borrow... > At any given time, you can have either one mutable reference or any number of immutable references.
- erik_seaberg 6y ago
  Oh, I get it, you're suggesting all references could be mutable, but still limited to the lifetime of the object. I guess the downside would be that you can't design an API like iterator invalidation that relies on "some (mutable) methods can't be called while any other (immutable) references exist".
  - comex 6y ago
    It would mean that, once you obtain a derived pointer – say, if you start with a Vec<Foo>, a pointer to Foo that refers to the first element – you would have to throw away that pointer as soon as you made any function call whatsoever. After all, that function call might mutate the Vec<Foo> and cause the backing storage to be reallocated. In practice, this is unworkable enough that it would basically forces you to reference count the Foo, so you could preserve pointers across calls by incrementing the reference count. On the other hand, Rust's approach is suboptimal in cases where you're using reference counting anyway, or are willing to pay the cost of reference counting.