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Sure, any arbitrary function (or macro) logic can allocate. It's more a philosophy, not something that's language-enforced[0] in Rust- if you're creating a muta

Sure, any arbitrary function (or macro) logic can allocate. It's more a philosophy, not something that's language-enforced[0] in Rust- if you're creating a mutable, variable-size data structure like a String or a Vec or a HashMap you're not going to be very surprised that it allocates at some point (though technically zero-length Vecs don't allocate on construction, they wait until an item is added) But closures don't require allocation, iterators don't require allocation, async doesn't require allocation. Copy semantics also don't allow allocation- implicit copies can only happen for data structures that are bitwise-copyable, which is enforced by the compiler. For copy-with-allocation you have to implement the Clone trait, and then invoke it explicitly with the .clone() method But the original context was a question of philosophy, so I was only speaking to Rust's overall philosophy [0] Technically I think if you're using no_std you won't have access to any standard constructs that allocate (which obviously will prevent their use at compile-time), though I believe you're still allowed to eg. call out to foreign functions manually that would allocate. And of course, this still isn't as granular as Zig's allocation-control.

tialaramex 4y ago
> Technically I think if you're using no_std you won't have access to any standard constructs that allocate Indeed, because you only have core, and not alloc, which is where the allocator lives. Mostly, core looks very similar to the functionality you can get of the same types in std - except that of course types which allocate are missing (Vec, HashMap, Box, String, etc.) and all the types which reflect operating system services are likewise missing (UdpSocket, File, Mutex, etc.) However there are deviations. For example, Rust's slices in core don't have a sort() method. Why not? Rust provides a stable sort which uses an allocator because that's much faster, it doesn't bother providing a not-so-good stable sort that can work without using an allocator, if you can't afford an allocator but you want stable sort that's a rather niche case, Rust won't solve it. Rust's sort_unstable() doesn't need an allocator and so that is provided on slices even with only the core library. Rust For Linux, the Linux kernel's Rust, has core, plus its own somewhat customised twist on alloc, plus an entirely custom kernel library. In Rust For Linux, the allocators are all explicit because Linus hates implied allocation. So for example in Rust For Linux a Vec doesn't have a push() method, because push() on a Vec can cause the Vec to grow, which is an allocation - instead Rust For Linux provides Vec::try_push() which fails if you'd need to grow the Vec before it could successfully push.

tialaramex 4y ago

> Technically I think if you're using no_std you won't have access to any standard constructs that allocate Indeed, because you only have core, and not alloc, which is where the allocator lives. Mostly, core looks very similar to the functionality you can get of the same types in std - except that of course types which allocate are missing (Vec, HashMap, Box, String, etc.) and all the types which reflect operating system services are likewise missing (UdpSocket, File, Mutex, etc.) However there are deviations. For example, Rust's slices in core don't have a sort() method. Why not? Rust provides a stable sort which uses an allocator because that's much faster, it doesn't bother providing a not-so-good stable sort that can work without using an allocator, if you can't afford an allocator but you want stable sort that's a rather niche case, Rust won't solve it. Rust's sort_unstable() doesn't need an allocator and so that is provided on slices even with only the core library. Rust For Linux, the Linux kernel's Rust, has core, plus its own somewhat customised twist on alloc, plus an entirely custom kernel library. In Rust For Linux, the allocators are all explicit because Linus hates implied allocation. So for example in Rust For Linux a Vec doesn't have a push() method, because push() on a Vec can cause the Vec to grow, which is an allocation - instead Rust For Linux provides Vec::try_push() which fails if you'd need to grow the Vec before it could successfully push.