Tasks, actors and garbage collection

[sighoya]

On Tuesday, 27 April 2021 at 14:59:22 UTC, russhy wrote:

> i am asking we should aim to be a memory agnostic language, 
> where one can plugin a GC transparently and do what ever he 
> wants, and at the same time transition to a full manually 
> managed scheme with allocators transparently

The problem is that you solely consider manual or managed 
resources on their own, but resources alias other resources and 
other resources alias the considered resource, the connection is 
the problem.

Not only does the GC manage memory for you at runtime, it also 
does this in a way to guarantee memory safety, speaking 
differently, the GC is some kind of runtime lifetime manager, 
although not a deterministic lifetime manager.
Anyway, this is a feature Rust completely lacks.

There are ways to reformulate the solution to cyclic data 
structures differently, but mostly with some additional memory or 
performance hit.

And just to say, no one moans when Rust didn't allow deleting 
resources when lifetimes say no, but the GC shouldn't say no?

Solving the problem in Rust is similar to solving the problem in 
D, just choose another memory model for the specific problem.

Could libraries more engage in providing such solutions, I think 
yes, but generalizing algorithms to offer you the most performant 
and safe code is hard and leads probably to a state space 
explosion.

Just look at the many ways you can create containers in Rust, you 
have Owned, Rc, Pin, Cell, Pin<...<...>> and whatever.