Wrangling the borrow checker seems pretty manual at times. And I don’t know why you’d bother with a persnickety compile time GC when JS’s GC isn’t a top issue for front end development.
There is no need for the concept of ownership of memory in JavaScript. So you are wasting time on a concept that doesn't matter in languages with a real GC. Dealing with ownership = manual memory management.
This used to not be true- once upon a time, Internet Explorer kept memory separate for DOM nodes and JavaScript objects, so it was very easy to leak memory by keeping reference cycles between the two.
Now, with all the desire for WASM to have DOM access I wonder if we'll end up finding ourselves back in that position again.
You can still have ownership issues and leaks even with a GC, if an object is reachable from a root. e.g. object A is in a cache and it references object B which references objects C D E F G ... which will now never get collected.
If A owns B then that is as expected but if A merely references B then it should hold a WeakRef
It's kinda exhausting to use TypeScript and run into situations where the type system is more of a suggestion than a rule. Passing around values [1] that have a type annotation but aren't the type they're annotated as is... in many ways worse than not typing them in the first place.
[1]: not even deserialized ones - ones that only moved within the language!
