[libre-riscv-dev] benefits of rust

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 22:18 Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:

> The one drawback I see to Rust is that it doesn't have a
> garbage-collected scope or storage class.  There are programming
> techniques that involve complexly tangled data structure.  Rust is
> not good for such problems.
>

Rust has support for reference counted smart pointers in the standard
library (Arc (atomic) and Rc (non-atomic)), where those aren't sufficient,
there are libraries for arenas (what I'm using in Kazan for compiler
data-structures (see shader-compiler-ir in the git repo) -- also used in
the rust compiler itself) as well as experimental libraries for full
garbage collection:
see shifgrethor for one of the more interesting GC libraries written by a
core rust contributor:
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/shifgrethor-garbage-collection-as-a-rust-library/8597

Incidentally, I am also writing a custom garbage collector in Rust for the
next version of my Minecraft-style game engine (Voxels) -- I'm using a 3D
variant of the hashlife algorithm (see wikipedia) which uses a garbage
collector except that the more garbage is kept around the faster it runs
(opposite of most GCs) since it is used to cache computations.

Jacob