Try out rust-gc, a garbage collector for Rust!

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1

So this has been baking for a while, and I think it's ready for a wider audience.

The README file contains basic instructions for how this can be used,
as well as a link to our original design (I also have a half-written
blog post about this design that's been languishing for a while, which I
may finish at some point).

I'm not sure if this is ready for "proper" usage yet, but it has a
working API and is sound, as far as I can tell (aside from the issue
with destructors).

Please let us know of any bugs or unsoundness you come across. Contributions (especially of testcases) welcome!

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2

Does this things like having a Vec<Gc<u8>> on the stack (i.e. meaning that the only connection between the GC'd pointers and being live is the random Vec pointer)? The fact that Rust allows data to be stored-in/secreted away essentially anywhere in memory was a major sticking point in my own GC experiments quite a while ago.

3

Yeah, you can stick Gc pointers wherever you want.

It doesn't track "stack roots", it tracks "accessible transitively via the stack"-roots (it's not stack scanning). The moment you stuff this Vec<Gc<u8>> into another GC'd object, the root counter will be decremented for the internal Gcs.

The goal was to write a non-stack scanning GC that doesn't need lints to be sound. This one almost fits the bill (barring the destructor issue which is independent of memory management design).

4

Oh, neat strategy!

(I poked around a bit and opened #8 and #9 to improve the performance a bit.)

5

reading

#[macro_use]
extern crate gc_derive;
extern crate gc;

use gc::Gc;

#[derive(Trace, Finalize)]
struct Foo {
    x: Gc<Foo>,
    y: u8,
    // ...
}

I'm wondering how do you construct the first Foo if you need a Foo instance to construct it?
See https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc/blame/master/README.md#L36

6

You don't. In general you have an Option there or something mutable.

7

Then should the doc be revisited? It really makes me confused.
I can hardly imagine the intention of this code.

8

It was.

https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc/pull/54

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