ferrocarril

Hi, I'm the author of Artichoke. I wouldn't say all gems are unusable. I implemented a Rack-compatible application server in an early version of Artichoke that is capable of serving a Sinatra Rack app. https://github.com/artichoke/ferrocarril

Conventional tracing GC is antithetical to Rust's zero-cost goals. The community is currently working on things like deterministic collection of reference cycles, e.g. https://github.com/lopopolo/ferrocarril/blob/master/cactusre... which should address the same use cases perhaps even more effectively.

Reference allocation _is_ essentially equivalent to garbage collection, the one thing it doesn't deal with correctly is reference cycles. Which are inherently unlikely if you spend the time and effort to organize your code properly. (The Rust community is also working on cycle-aware reference collection, e.g. https://github.com/lopopolo/ferrocarril/blob/master/cactusre... but this will always come with some drawbacks.)