[Jweb_Guru]

I mean... people program large developments in Rust with pretty minimal use of Arc. It's clearly possible to structure many programs this way (though they do not necessarily look like programs in other languages). It's important not to make extreme and definitive statements about what's realistic that are contradicted by a bunch of existing programs... in any case this has little bearing on the reference counting vs tracing GC performance thing. It also might be instructive to look at how Rust frameworks deal with your UI example: mostly, by keeping a vector of UI widgets and reusing the allocation over and over. Therefore, you shouldn't see a significant pause there (you could probably argue the pause comes when resizing the vector technically, but it is generally efficient enough that you're not going to notice it unless the vector is very very large).

[kaba0]

Statically adding code at the end of scope-leaves is different than knowing when the deallocation will happen.

The borrow checker doesn’t know when will the scope end, it only knows that however it happens upholds the invariants it cares about. You might call two entirely different code path inside a method and rust will only execute the dealloc logic at the end at a non-deterministic time. But maybe we just use different terminology here.

[Jweb_Guru]

Fun fact: Rust actually had a proposal at one point to execute drops entirely statically, with no runtime flags on the stack. It was decided against because people thought it would be too confusing as it would be hard to tell when the destructor would run, but for purely memory related destructors it would probably be acceptable.

I do see what you're trying to get at, I think, but it's also worth noting that the use of stuff like arenas and vectors to absorb the cost of the repeated reallocations goes a long way here towards making deallocation times predictable in practice (if not in theory). It is certainly the case that you can mostly reduce the deallocation overhead to ~ zero for any particular part of your Rust program without that much effort, unless you are writing an interpreter for a different language that expects GC semantics (at least, that's been my experience).