cactusref

Naive use of RC doesn't look like tracing much but as soon as you need cycle-aware RC like the CactusRef the algo looks a lot like tracing GC https://github.com/artichoke/cactusref#cycle-detection

Yes, but you can have other kinds of cycle-aware memory management, which integrate better with their surrounding code than plain tracing GC. E.g. something like https://github.com/artichoke/cactusref which can collect cycles deterministically, and does not have to trace the whole heap to do so (which implies a lot of hidden overhead in plain GC, because all heap-allocated structures must then be legible to the tracing routine).

> garbage collectors for Rust that function reasonably are still pretty experimental You can also use something like https://github.com/artichoke/cactusref - which provides an equivalent of Rc<T> with nearly-seamless, timely detection and collection of deallocation cycles. This gives you the equivalent of full GC, but using a "zero-overhead" approach that integrates more cleanly with how Rust idiomatically works.