[nickpsecurity]

I always ask people that say this if they tried using reference counting during the times the borrow checker was too difficult. Rust supports it. There's going to be some performance hit. Most in your situation use GC'd languages, though. So, it seems like Rust with ref counting could still make for easy web development where you get Rust benefits in borrow-checked code but rest is still safe and quick to write.

That's the theory anyway. I haven't gotten any data from people trying that on real-world apps, though. There could be non-obvious problems with it.

[hathawsh]

I suspect that it might be easy to port most code written in high level languages to Rust if you're willing to use "Rc" or "Arc" liberally. The drawback is Rc does not support cyclic garbage collection (AFAIK), so the resulting code would often have memory leaks.

[pimeys]

It does. You just have to use an Rc/Weak Arc/Weak combination.

[hathawsh]

Weak refs are a way to work around reference counting cycles, but cyclic garbage collection is a more complete solution and it's a core feature of nearly every high level language.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.collecting-cycles....

It seems like people who often use Rust's Rc and Arc will long for some way to implement generic cyclic garbage collection. I don't yet see a way (other than unsafe code), but I may be missing something.

[bluejekyll]

The biggest issue, and I fall back on Rc a lot, is that often you end up needing Arc. Especially in async code, where Send is generally desirable. But it's a great way to get around annoyances with shared memory.