4 ms·

I’ve recently been writing personal code that leaks like a sieve. It’s just not worth my time to find every leak when the lifetime of the process is finite and

I’ve recently been writing personal code that leaks like a sieve. It’s just not worth my time to find every leak when the lifetime of the process is finite and short and it will only ever run on a machine with gigs of memory. I haven’t thought through your question enough but maybe a situation where memory usage would be super high if waiting until the end of scope? I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situation but I have a gut feeling that freeing mid scope is important under certain circumstances to keep the code simple and understandable.

coder543 5y ago
> I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situation but I have a gut feeling that freeing mid scope is important under certain circumstances to keep the code simple and understandable. I explained in my previous comment that you can explicitly "drop" any value at any time in Rust, if you choose.[0] But if you don't, it will still be dropped at the end of the scope. The developer has control, but the language will watch your back. [0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html
StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Heck, this is the entire memory management model of PHP, which I found shocking when I learned it, but makes sense given that the language is intended to generate web pages: just allocate, never reclaim the memory, then kill the process when you’re done.
- coder543 5y ago
  Do you have any sources? Maybe some truly ancient version? PHP has done garbage collection (seemingly mixed with some reference counting, like Python) for at least 10 or 15 years... I didn't bother to keep searching for even older information, but nothing I saw indicated that PHP only released memory when the process for a request exited. I don't even think most mainstream uses of PHP have done the process-per-request model for decades, but I could be wrong.
  - tored 5y ago
    Correct, garbage collector was added to PHP 5.3, prior to 5.3 PHP did only reference counting. PHP 5.3 was released in June of 2009. Here is a series of articles that describes it in detail https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php Especially look at this example where the same script is executed with and without GC https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.performance-considerations.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.performance-consid...

coder543 5y ago

> I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situation but I have a gut feeling that freeing mid scope is important under certain circumstances to keep the code simple and understandable. I explained in my previous comment that you can explicitly "drop" any value at any time in Rust, if you choose.[0] But if you don't, it will still be dropped at the end of the scope. The developer has control, but the language will watch your back. [0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html

StefanKarpinski 5y ago

Heck, this is the entire memory management model of PHP, which I found shocking when I learned it, but makes sense given that the language is intended to generate web pages: just allocate, never reclaim the memory, then kill the process when you’re done.

coder543 5y ago
Do you have any sources? Maybe some truly ancient version? PHP has done garbage collection (seemingly mixed with some reference counting, like Python) for at least 10 or 15 years... I didn't bother to keep searching for even older information, but nothing I saw indicated that PHP only released memory when the process for a request exited. I don't even think most mainstream uses of PHP have done the process-per-request model for decades, but I could be wrong.
- tored 5y ago
  Correct, garbage collector was added to PHP 5.3, prior to 5.3 PHP did only reference counting. PHP 5.3 was released in June of 2009. Here is a series of articles that describes it in detail https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php Especially look at this example where the same script is executed with and without GC https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.performance-considerations.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.performance-consid...