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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

Swift uses automatic reference counting. From some cursory reading, the major difference from Rust in this regard is that Swift references are always tracked atomically, whereas in Rust they may not be atomic in a single-owner context.

To my mind (again, with admittedly limited familiarity), I would think:

- Atomic operations in general don’t necessarily provide deterministic timing, but I'm assuming (maybe wrongly?) for Rust’s case they’re regarded as a relatively fixed overhead?

- That would seem to hold for Swift as well, just… with more overhead.

To the extent any of this is wrong or missing some nuance, I’m happy to be corrected.

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Incrementing an atomic counter every time a reference is copied is a significant amount of overhead, which is why most runtimes prefer garbage collection to reference counting (that, and the inability of referencing counting to handle cycles elegantly).

Rust doesn't rely on reference counting unless explicitly used by the program, and even then you can choose between atomically-reference-counted pointers (Arc) vs non-atomic-reference-counted pointers (Rc) that the type system prevents from being shared between threads.

I promise I’m not trying to be obtuse or argumentative, but I think apart from cycles your response restates exactly what I took from my reading on the subject and tried to articulate. So I’m not sure if what I should take away is:

- ARC is generally avoided by GC languages, which puts Swift in a peculiar position for a language without manual memory management (without any consideration of Swift per se for the case I asked about)

- Swift’s atomic reference counting qualitatively eliminates it from consideration because it’s applied even in single threaded workloads, negating determinism in a way I haven’t understood

- It’s quantitatively eliminated because that overhead has such a performance impact that it’s not worth considering

Swift has a similar memory model to Rust, except that where Rust forbids things Swift automatically copies them to make it work.

People using other languages appear terrified of reference count slowness for some reason, but it usually works well, and atomics are fast on ARM anyway.

It's important to note that while Swift often allows for code similar to Rust to be written, the fact that it silently inserts ARC traffic or copies often means that people are going to write code that do things that Rust won't let them do and realize after the fact that their bottleneck is something that they would never have written in Rust. I wouldn't necessarily call this a language failure, but it's something worth looking out for: idiomatic Swift code often diverges from what might be optimally efficient from a memory management perspective.

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