Re:Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use?
by bjourne on Thursday December 23, 2021 @11:56AM
(#29663677)
Because their gc is a proof-of-concept created specifically for this research. It doesn't even deallocate memory. Most likely, they didn't have their students write any threaded code so thread-safety wasn't a concern. For a production ready tracing gc, of course they would add thread safety, it's not a big problem.
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Re:Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use?
by dahfizz on Thursday December 23, 2021 @01:48PM
(#29665051)
No, this is the fundamental tradeoff they made to make the Bronze'd Rust easy to use:
> Rust permits only one mutable reference to a value at a time... With Bronze, mutation is permitted through all references to each garbage-collected object, with no extra effort. A key tradeoff is that Bronze does not guarantee thread safety; as in other garbage collected languages, it is the programmer’s responsibility to ensure safety.
Allowing mutability anywhere is what fundamentally makes Bronze easier to learn, and more error-prone.
Re:Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use?
by bjourne on Thursday December 23, 2021 @02:17PM
(#29665364)
The paper's author has already explained to you how thread safety can be achieved in a production-ready gc. This is not something that is particularly difficult to engineer and is quite orthogonal to whether one chooses to use tracing gc, ref counting or Rust-like borrow checking.