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gara
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Removing Garbage Collection from the Rust Language (2013)
This comment is misleading &| misinformed.
Sum types are built-in [1] for formal parameters. `nil` is only for `ref|ptr` types. In much code you can just use stack allocated value types and there is neither GC concern nor nil concern, but there is also a mode to help: https://nim-lang.github.io/Nim/manual_experimental_strictnot...
Nim has an easy-ish to use Lisp-like syntax macro system where you just receive & process an AST. So, to do the rest you can make libraries adding the feature without relying upon upstream compiler: such as https://github.com/beef331/sumtypes for variables with sum types or pattern matching libs like https://andreaferretti.github.io/patty/ | https://github.com/alehander92/gara.
samsara
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Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers
> IME it's the other way around, per-object individual lifetimes is a rare special case
It depends on your application domain. But in most cases where objects have "individual lifetimes" you can still use reference counting, which has lower latency and memory overhead than tracing GC and interacts well with manual memory management. Tracing GC can then be "plugged in" for very specific cases, preferably using a high performance concurrent implementation much like https://github.com/chc4/samsara (for Rust) or https://github.com/pebal/sgcl (for C++).
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Why choose async/await over threads?
> Just for example: "it needs a GC" could be the heart of such an argument
Rust can actually support high-performance concurrent GC, see https://github.com/chc4/samsara for an experimental implementation. But unlike other languages it gives you the option of not using it.
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Boehm Garbage Collector
The compiler support you need is quite limited. Here's an implementation of cycle collection in Rust: https://github.com/chc4/samsara It's made possible because Rust can tell apart read-only and read-write references (except for interior mutable objects, but these are known to the compiler and references to them can be treated as read-write). This avoids a global stop-the-world for the entire program.
Cascading deletes are rare in practice, and if anything they are inherent to deterministic deletion, which is often a desirable property. When they're possible, one can often use arena allocation to avoid the issue altogether, since arenas are managed as a single object.
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Steel – An embedded scheme interpreter in Rust
There are concurrent GC implementations for Rust, e.g. Samsara https://redvice.org/2023/samsara-garbage-collector/ https://github.com/chc4/samsara that avoid blocking, except to a minimal extent in rare cases of contention. That fits pretty well with the pattern of "doing a bit of GC every frame".
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Removing Garbage Collection from the Rust Language (2013)
There are a number of efforts along these lines, the most interesting is probably Samsara https://github.com/chc4/samsara https://redvice.org/2023/samsara-garbage-collector/ which implements a concurrent, thread-safe GC with no global "stop the world" phase.
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I built a garbage collector for a language that doesn't need one
Nice blog post! I also wrote a concurrent reference counted cycle collector in Rust (https://github.com/chc4/samsara) though never published it to crates.io. It's neat to see the different choices that people made implementing similar goals, and dumpster works pretty differently from how I did it. I hit the same problems wrt concurrent mutation of the graph when trying to count in-degree of nodes, or adding references during a collection - I didn't even think of doing generational references and just have a RwLock...
What are some alternatives?
Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).
sundial-gc - WIP: my Tweag open source fellowship project
sumtypes - Easy to use Nim sum type library
nitro - Experimental OOP language that compiled to native code with non-fragile and stable ABI
patty - A pattern matching library for Nim
node-libnmap - API to access nmap from node.js
qcell - Statically-checked alternatives to RefCell and RwLock
starlight - JS engine in Rust
gc-arena - Incremental garbage collection from safe Rust
helix - A post-modern modal text editor.
coalton - Coalton is an efficient, statically typed functional programming language that supercharges Common Lisp.