samsara VS may

> 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++).

> 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.

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.

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".

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.

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...

https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may

The project has some serious restrictions and unsound footguns (e.g. around TLS), but otherwise it's usable enough. There are also a number of C/C++ libraries, but I can not comment on those.

> e.g. Linux mutexes

You don't want to use blocking mutexes anyway with async.

> or Rust's Rc

This is only half true. The danger is that two `Rc` that point to the same data are in different threads. But it should be safe to move all of them at once from one thread to another, which is exactly the case if all the `Rc`s involved live inside a `Future`. The problem is that this is a non-local property that's hard to encode in the type system.

> By the way, if you wish to test uncolored async in Rust, you can find an implementation here: https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may .

FYI that's known to be unsound due to thread locals. And more generally it doesn't seem to give much attention to safety (see for example how it allowed unsound scoped tasks, or the fact it allows doing unsafe operations in some of its macros due to wrong scoping of `unsafe` blocks).

It seems that rust removed native green threads as against it's philosophy: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29428318/why-did-rust-remove-the-green-threading-model-whats-the-disadvantage#29430403 but there are good CSP libraries e.g. https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may and yet people really like e.g. Tokio for Async/Await (although it also has greenthreads!) What am I missing?

Can you admit that you failed in making it a pleasant experience to write async, especially for library authors? I don’t think it’s too late to admit failure and implement something like May https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may

Your benchmark is comparing apples to oranges, you're benchmarking different things. If you wanted to compare a Rust solution to something like what Go does, you would need to use something like this library.

Yep. This is the best coroutine library right now https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may

I am still intrigued by the stackful coroutine library, May https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may. I would like to see how far this library can push the boundaries of being a higher level alternative to async

There is also "may" which attempts to be a Rust version of goroutines. I have not used it though, so can't comment on anything further about it.

This library https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may implement Stackful Coroutines in Rust which I believe is pretty close to what you're asking about. I believe it's a reasonably complete implementation, but it doesn't have much traction because most of the Rust ecosystem is using either async/await or native threads.

I've never worked with C# so I need to look into that.

The one saving grace with Rust is if everyone decides to say "screw async" and just builds synchronous APIs, then we use something like [May](https://github.com/Xudong-Huang/may) for green threading.