What does HackerNews think of shifgrethor?

It'd be possible to add an active GC to Rust. There are some library attempts at that:

- https://lib.rs/crates/gc

- https://github.com/withoutboats/shifgrethor

But they don't look particularly usable.

Beyond that, yeah, it sucks.

High-level and low-level are ill-defined and I prefer to stick to more precise language. Additionally, calling Rust high-level is inaccurate. It has high-level features, but the linear typing used by the borrowing system ultimately imposes cognitive overhead that does not exist in, say, OCaml. I think it’s also interesting to note that garbage collectors for Rust that function reasonably are still pretty experimental, with the most promising approach I’ve seen so far being withoutboats’s Shifgrethor (https://github.com/withoutboats/shifgrethor).

Haskell and Idris and the like (other languages with a type system in the calculus of constructions) inarguably support a higher level of abstraction than Rust does, and are also “GC-obligate” languages. So your example is something of a red herring. I could say the same about Kotlin and Swift and Scala, none of which really have a strong story for static memory safety like Rust has, though it’s being considered for Swift. The only language that is reasonably complete that I could think to compare it to is ATS, which is far more complex as a result.

There are garbage collection libraries in progress: rust-gc[1] and shifgrethor[2]. If you mean language support, then no, not really, though it was discussed in https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/415

[1]: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc [2]: https://github.com/withoutboats/shifgrethor