On Fri, Aug 09, 2024 at 08:59:05PM -0700, Bruce Perens via Dng wrote:
> Yes, I have found the Rust concepts of *Ownership *and *Lifetimes *very
> helpful, and the fact that Rust code without the *unsafe *keyword (which
> you should only
> be using for hardware access) is both thread-safe and re-entrant-safe is
> very useful. I agree that the investment is sizable. Most of my
> Microprocessor
> work is on ESP-32, both the RISC-V and the Xtensa architectures. Rust is
> supported for those platforms.
>
> I bet if you wanted to piss off some Rustaceans, you could wire the Boehm
> garbage collector into it. And then publish a library and a tutorial. That
> would do it!

Lack of garbage collection is one of the real problems in Rust, but the
Rustaceans refuse to recognise it. There are problems that have real-time
components that need no garbage collection, where current Rust is sufficient,
but also have components where complex storage management needs garbage
collection.

There should be no problem adding a storage class to Rust for garbage collected
storage, with the understanding that any application that really cannot stand
garbage collection delays will simply not use it.

Parallel processing with part in the current rust style and part in
garbage-collected style should be no difficulty to implement and make
secure.

-- hendrik