Re:Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use?
by ssokolow on Thursday December 23, 2021 @08:16PM
(#29668813)
Appealing in theory, but not necessarily attainable in practice.
I use Rust to write CPython extensions... it's a well-known fact that GCs are solitary creatures and you're in for a lot of hassle if you want two different GCs to play nicely together.
I use Rust for all sorts of things because I like the high floor Rust sets for the crates I depend on, and I pair that with being more likely to rewrite or find an alternative for a dependency that uses `unsafe` in a context I don't feel it's merited.
A lot of what the borrow checker brings is fundamentally about requiring the programmer to be more precise about what they intend, rather than patching the cracks with extra CPU/RAM or waiting until runtime and hoping it won't come up.
My main concern here is the risk of Rust running into a more minor version of what happened to D, where you effectively had two language ecosystems and the one with a GC and all the libraries wasn't an alternative to C or C++ and wasn't a very appealing alternative to Java.
I use Rust to write CPython extensions... it's a well-known fact that GCs are solitary creatures and you're in for a lot of hassle if you want two different GCs to play nicely together.
I use Rust for all sorts of things because I like the high floor Rust sets for the crates I depend on, and I pair that with being more likely to rewrite or find an alternative for a dependency that uses `unsafe` in a context I don't feel it's merited.
A lot of what the borrow checker brings is fundamentally about requiring the programmer to be more precise about what they intend, rather than patching the cracks with extra CPU/RAM or waiting until runtime and hoping it won't come up.
My main concern here is the risk of Rust running into a more minor version of what happened to D, where you effectively had two language ecosystems and the one with a GC and all the libraries wasn't an alternative to C or C++ and wasn't a very appealing alternative to Java.