A Tour of Safe Tracing GC Designs in Rust

I’ve been thinking about garbage collection in Rust for a long time, ever since I started working on Servo’s JS layer. I’ve designed a GC library, worked on GC integration ideas for Rust itself, worked on Servo’s JS GC integration, and helped out with a couple other GC projects in Rust.

As a result, I tend to get pulled into GC discussions fairly often. I enjoy talking about GCs – don’t get me wrong – but I often end up going over the same stuff. Being lazy I’d much prefer to be able to refer people to a single place where they can get up to speed on the general space of GC design, after which it’s possible to have more in depth discussions about the specific tradeoffs necessary.

I’ll note that some of the GCs in this post are experiments or unmaintained. The goal of this post is to showcase these as examples of design, not necessarily general-purpose crates you may wish to use, though some of them are usable crates as well.

A thing that often muddles discussions about GCs is that according to some definition of “GC”, simple reference counting is a GC. Typically the definition of GC used in academia broadly refers to any kind of automatic memory management. However, most programmers familiar with the term “GC” will usually liken it to “what Java, Go, Haskell, and C# do”, which can be unambiguously referred to as tracing garbage collection.

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