"Memory safety without garbage collection." is now advertised as a "key value proposition" (this isn't quite the same as saying "we're not thinking of ever adding garbage collection", of course).
« Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and intrinsics on which GCs can be built, without including an actual GC itself. »
This is the "Unfinished design for a builtin Rust GC" described in TFA.
2014-09. RFC 256 https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/0256-remove-refcounting-gc-...
« Remove the reference-counting based Gc<T> type from the standard library and its associated support infrastructure from rustc.
Doing so lays a cleaner foundation upon which to prototype a proper tracing GC »
Contemporary with that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8312327 nikomatsakis:
« I wouldn't be so quick to give up on GC support yet! "We have a plan!" But I don't think we'll have it in for Rust 1.0. »
2015-04:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.h...
"Memory safety without garbage collection." is now advertised as a "key value proposition" (this isn't quite the same as saying "we're not thinking of ever adding garbage collection", of course).
2016-08: https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/08/18/gc-support-in-...
« Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and intrinsics on which GCs can be built, without including an actual GC itself. »
This is the "Unfinished design for a builtin Rust GC" described in TFA.
2018-10:
the introductory post for the shifgrethor library (described in TFA): https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/shifgrethor-i/
includes a bolded « I do not expect we will ever “add GC to Rust” ».