| Regardless of whether
manual memory management is desirable as an end goal, support for it is
essentially required if you wish to permit tasks to exchange ownership
of data without copies. For example, in Servo we have a double-buffered
system where mutable memory buffers are exchanged between the various
parts of the system. In order to make this safe, we have to guarantee
that this buffer is unaliased at the point where it is sent—if you know
it's unaliased, of course, you also know that you could safely free it.
As a broader point, it turns out there are a LOT of type system things you can do if you know something about aliasing (or the lack thereof). Our current approach to freezing data structures for example is reliant on this. Safe array splitting for data parallelism—if we ever go in that direction—will be reliant on this. And so forth. So, supporting a unique-pointer-like construct makes a lot of sense. Niko
|
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