rust-gc VS gluon

rust-langdev has a lot of libraries for building compilers in Rust. Perhaps you could use these to make your implementation easier, and revisit it later if you want to build things from scratch. I'd suggest logos for lexing, LALRPOP / chumsky for parsing, and rust-gc for garbage collection.

There's nothing stopping you from doing that in Rust. See rust-gc for an example of a GC implemented in Rust. Another example is mozjs, which is Rust bindings to SpiderMonkey. The GC there is implemented in C++, but it shows how you'd structure wrapper types for GC'd pointers in Rust so that you can use them safely, even with all the "ugliness" of a browser-grade GC.

One can have a GC as a library, https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc

The ones I am aware of are gc and broom. None will be as simple to use as the one in old Rust as userland implementations don't have the benefit of first-class integrated compiler support.

Rust has rust-gc, which is an attempt to add opt-in GC over Rust's more traditional automatic memory management. It's a neat project, but I'm not sure where it's actually being used.

Inb4 "already exists": the question is about making it convenient, not just imlementing the behavior.

There is also a library implementation of garbage collection for Rust, made by someone from the Rust core team.

Yep! And I'd actually fully agree those are garbage collection, there's also a crate by Manish which does """real""" garbage collection—https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc

I don't know that I'd say it "works" - it's never a technique I've needed to use myself, but it's the approach taken by e.g. https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc

Anyway, I found something recent that implements "rc" but in terms of tracing: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc/ . Maybe useful for projects involving graphs of objects.

A colleague of mine used https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon with great success in our rust projects. Although it probably can't run in a no_std environment.

Aside from these, if you want some inspiration for a production-grade language built in Rust, you might want to go through the source code of Starlark and Gluon.

Some languages, like Zig and Gluon have an import expression, where the imported symbols are under a local constant's name. Gluon then also supports destructuring, and Zig has had multiple proposals for years about it, none of which are canon. That is, code like this:

This should be a good use-case for rust-based scripting languages, I think.

I loosely followed a project of that kind a while ago, I don't quite remember if it was Gluon [0] or Dyon [1]. Not sure if these are still active, or if another competitor showed up in meantime.

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[0] https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon

[1] https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/dyon

Or if you wanted something more Rust-native, you could try Gluon.

Gluon