Ownership & Move Semantics

Flame achieves high performance and complete memory safety through a compile-time ownership model inspired by Rust. This eliminates both memory leaks and the unpredictable latency spikes of a Garbage Collector (GC).

The Three Rules of Ownership

Every value in Flame has a variable that is called its owner.
There can only be one owner at a time.
When the owner goes out of scope, the value is dropped automatically from memory (RAII).

Move Semantics

When a variable is assigned to another variable or passed by value to a function, ownership of the data is moved:

fn consume_data(s: String) {
    print($"Received: {s}")
} // `s` is dropped here when the function exits

let original = "Hello Flame"

// Ownership is transferred (moved) to `consume_data`
consume_data(original)

// ERROR: `original` was moved and is no longer valid!
// print(original)

Scope & Deterministic Drops (RAII)

Memory is freed the moment an owner exits its lexical { ... } block:

{
    let buffer = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
    print(buffer.len()) // 5
} // `buffer` goes out of scope; heap allocation is freed immediately!

// `buffer` is inaccessible here