The memory models that underlie programming languages (2016)

Rust has an interesting, and somewhat difficult, memory model. First, there's the single ownership tree. Single ownership is checked by the borrow checker. You can have only one mutable reference to a data object at a time, and that's also checked by the borrow checker. If you can stay within that model, if the program compiles, it will probably work at the data access level. But then there are all the escape hatches. There's "Rc", which is reference counting for…

The older I become the more I realize how influential Lisp is/was. The Lisp memory model presented here looks like object oriented data structures, if you squint a little. Java dragged C++ programmers 'halfway to Lisp' [1]. I now do a lot of programming on Python, which is so obviously like Lisp that MIT teaches it instead of Scheme. We don't have continuations and macro yet in mainstream languages, but we'll get there. [1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...