Comment by tialaramex
Comment by tialaramex a day ago
The specific language feature you want if you insist that you don't want this kind of leak is Linear Types.
Rust has Affine Types. This means Rust cares that for any value V of type T, Rust can see that we did not destroy V twice (or more often).
With Linear Types the compiler checks that you destroyed V exactly once, not less and not more.
However, one reason I don't end up caring about Leak Safety of this sort is that in fact users do not care that you didn't "leak" data in this nerd sense. In this nerd sense what matters is only leaks where we lost all reference to the heap data. But from a user's perspective it's just as bad if we did have the reference but we forgot - or even decided explicitly not - to throw it away and get back the RAM.
The obvious way to make this mistake "by accident" in Rust is to have two things which keep each other alive via reference counting and yet have been disconnected and forgotten by the rest of the system. A typical garbage collected language would notice that these are garbage and destroy them both, but Rust isn't a GC language of course. Calling Box::leak isn't likely to happen by accident (though you might mistakenly believe you will call it only once but actually use it much more often)
I think the main part of Ghostty's design mentioned here that - as a Rust programmer - I think is probably a mistake is the choice to use a linked list. To me this looks exactly like it needs VecDeque, a circular buffer backed by a growable array type. Their "clever" typical case where you emit more text and so your oldest page is scrapped and re-used to form your newest page, works very nicely in VecDeque, and it seems like they never want the esoteric fast things a linked list can do, nor do they need multi-writer concurrency like the guts of an OS kernel, they want O(1) pop & push from opposite ends. Zig's Deque is probably that same thing but in Zig.
The issue isn’t linked list vs dequeue but type confusion about what was in the container. They didn’t forget to drop it - they got confused about which type was in the list when popping and returned it to the pool instead of munmap.
The way to solve this in Rust would be to put this logic in the drop and hide each page type in an enum. That way you can’t ever confuse the types or what happens when you drop.