As a user of any higher level data structures there’s no way for you to know what happens to values passed though. You’re absolutely right that if you were using nothing but the stdlib you always know (mostly) that you are explicitly calling forget.
The problem is that you don’t know that to be the case as the consumer of a library without a thorough audit of the library. Especially when dealing with ffis things get very muddy very fast.
Especially when dealing with ffis things get very muddy very fast.
True. But an ffi biding API leaking resources (memory or otherwise) is a bug in that binding. This holds true for any RAII-using language, including C++. I don’t think faulty Drop implementations have anything to do with the subjects covered by the article!
