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Manishearth
rust-gc
Rust2015–2025
Manishearth / rust-gc

rust-gc

Simple tracing (mark and sweep) garbage collector for Rust

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16Distinct people
21Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Simple tracing (mark and sweep) garbage collector for Rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year21 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-05-18 00:42:25 UTC to 2025-04-28 19:43:03 UTC.

02462015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

21 sources
Ciantic·Apr 28, 2025
> Rust can not represent the vast majority of allocations Do you mean cyclic types? Rust being low-level, nobody prevents one from implementing garbage-collected types, and I've been looking into this myself: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc It's "Simple tracing (mark and sweep) garbage collector for Rust", which allows cyclic allocations with simple `Gc<Foo>` syntax. Can't vouch for that implementation, but something like this would be good for many cases.
In Migrating away from Rust
vlovich123·Mar 12, 2025
I wonder if they explored using a Gc like https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc with Rust. I think that probably removes all the borrow checker / cycle impedance mismatch while providing a path to remove Gc from the critical path altogether. Of course the Rust Gc crates are probably more immature, maybe slower, than Go’s so if there’s no path to getting rid of cycles as part of down-the-road perf optimization, then Go makes more sense.
In A 10x Faster TypeScript
ben-schaaf·Oct 8, 2020
For "non strict mode" meaning bypassing the borrow checker, rust already has that and it's called "unsafe". And if by "non struct mode" you mean not having manual garbage collection then you've already got that either as `::leak` letting you leak memory or various GC implementations like https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc/.
In Rust 1.47
lifthrasiir·Jan 22, 2020
First of all, Andrei Alexandrescu is not the creator of D. > With Rust, programmers have to spend most of their mental energy worrying about management of memory, which has largely been automated already. This is a common misunderstanding. I think the word "automated" is misleading, and suggest that we should look at two phases of memory management: the plan and the execution. In traditional low-level languages like C, you plan how to manage memory and you write code to execute that plan yourself. Your code may not match the plan, thus all sort of problems ensues. In languages with GC, you are allowed to not think how to manage memory and GC will execute their own inferred plan... until it is not. At some point you are forced to think how to manage memory and also tune GC and/or code to fit to your belated plan. This point may not be reac
Read the rest
hed (simple scripts) or can be delayed much further (good modern GC), of course, so it still remains very useful. In (a typical use case of) Rust, you plan how to manage memory but give that plan to the compiler to check if the plan is executed correctly. The compiler also generate code for common executions that you don't have to. So the execution is mostly automated (or rather, delegated), while planning is not. A common theme here is that you can't avoid at least the planning once you've got past a threshold. If GC would supplant even that planning, you won't need value types at all; isn't that what the generation hypothesis is all about? But many languages with GC but not value types now get them. While it can be argued that Rust's affine typing is not sufficient to capture some common memory management patterns [1], that fact doesn't diminish the value of explicit memory management planning, and thus Rust's. [1] And I think it is actually true! Indeed, I believe affine typing plus GC can be actually better than affine typing or GC alone (and value types mimic a good subset of this). There are some Rust libraries for tracing GC (e.g. [2]) as a starting point. [2] https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc
In Why Rust closures are somewhat hard
webmaven·Jan 28, 2017
The paper describes the design and implementation of a Garbage Collector in Rust: "We show that our Immix implementation has almost identical performance on micro benchmarks, compared to its implementation in C, and outperforms the popular BDW collector on the gcbench micro benchmark. We find that Rust’s safety features do not create significant barriers to implementing a high performance collector. Though memory managers are usually considered low-level, our high performance implementation relies on very little unsafe code, with the vast majority of the implementation benefiting from Rust’s safety." Partial source for the authors' implementation is contained in the paper's appendices rather than in a repository, other implementations mentioned in the paper: A reference counted type with cycle collection for Rust: https://github.com/fitzg
Read the rest
en/bacon-rajan-cc A simple tracing (mark and sweep) garbage collector for Rust: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc
In Rust as a Language for High Performance GC Implementation [pdf]
kaoD·Jan 24, 2017
Then use https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc if you're willing to pay the price of a GC (still experimental). Or better, stick to a GC'ed language. If you don't need manual memory management, it's obviously going to be a burden. There are still use cases for manual memory management though, and that's where Rust comes in. Use the right tool for the job.
In The struggle with Rust

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