On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]>wrote:

>
>>   http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1784423.html
>>
>
> I read the post, but I don't see anything in there explaining why GC was a
> problem.
>

I don't think that blog post is any official word, but to me the opinions
of the author on why GC is problematic for Rust are pretty clearly laid
out..

"Way, way back in the day, Rust had neither automatic GC nor ownership
types. It only had automatic reference counting (that the compiler manages
for you), which necessitated a cycle collector that never quite got
finished. But ref-counting everything just added too much overheard.
Everyone figured that GCing everything would also add too much overheard."

"we've tried hard to avoid incorporating new technology into it. We haven't
always succeeded at failing to be novel, but we have a rule of thumb of not
including any ideas in the language that are new as of the past ten years
of programming language research."

Combine these two together, and it paints the picture that they don't feel
confident they can meet their performance targets with tried-and-tested
well-established "rusty" GC techniques.
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