GiooschiA comparison of Rust's borrow checker to the one in C#
That is interesting and I didn’t know C# had anything like that. I saw another article recently saying at some point we were likely to see Rust get garbage collection.
Would you have a link to that? I know there are many third-party garbage collectors for Rust, but if there’s something semi-official being proposed or prototyped I’d be most curious :)
It’s not official or semi-official, it was just someone (a well known Haskell guru if that matters) speculating in a blog post.
So someone that is not involved in rust at all and does not seem to like the language thinks it will get a GC at some point? That is not a very credible source for such a statement.
Rust is very unlikely to see an official GC anytime soon if ever. There are zero signs it will ever get one. There was a lot of serious talk about it before 1.0 days - but never made it into the language. Similar to green threads which was a feature of the language pre 1.0 days but dropped before the 1.0 release. Rust really wants to have a no required runtime and leans heavy on the zero-cost abstractions for things. Which a GC would impose on the language.
It sounds like he uses Rust and has some issues with it. IDK about green threads but Ada has had tasks (implemented in gnat with posix threads) from the beginning. If you pin a task to a CPU core and don’t use gc in it, that can handle your realtime stuff. Or these days, it’s becoming more common to use an fpga for cycle level timing control.
Note that traditional Forth cooperative multitaskers used a few hundred bytes of code or even less. This stuff doesn’t have to be bloaty.
Could, could, could. You could do a lot of things. Rust had a gc and it [was removed] (…github.io/…/2013-06-02-removing-garbage-collecti…) so they have already explored this area and are very unlikely to do so again unless there is a big need for it that libraries cannot solve. Which I have not seen anyone that actually uses the language a lot see the need for.
Not like how async was talked about - that required a lot if discussion and tests in libraries before it was added to the language. GC dies not have anywhere near as many people pushing for it, they only noise I see is people on the outside thinking it would be nice with no details on how it might work in the language.
Removing Garbage Collection From the Rust Language
I've been floating ways to simplify the memory management story in Rust around the core team lately. Memory management is a contentious topic, since we've worked hard to get to the current state of things, and with the push toward stability lately, there is a (quite reasonable!) resistance to any changes at this state. Still, I think the current memory management story in Rust is worth revisiting, as the current state of things may cause us problems down the line. Working with Dave Herman and Niko Matsakis, I've formulated a fairly concrete proposal at this point. The basic idea is to remove garbage collection from the core language and relegate it to the standard library, with a minimal set of language hooks in place to allow for flexible, pluggable automatic memory management.