[dajonker]

If I understand the article correctly it's for those cases where you want memory safety (i.e. not using "unsafe") but where the borrow checker is really hard to work with such as a doubly linked list, where nodes can point to each other.

For the rest you'd still use non-GC rust.

[zozbot234]

A doubly linked list is not the optimal case for GC. It can be implemented with some unsafe code, and there are approaches that implement it safely with GhostCell (or similar facilities, e.g. QCell) plus some zero-overhead (mostly) "compile time reference counting" to cope with the invariants involved in having multiple references simultaneously "own" the data. See e.g. https://github.com/matthieu-m/ghost-collections for details.

Where GC becomes necessary is the case where even static analysis cannot really mitigate the issue of having multiple, possibly cyclical references to the same data. This is actually quite common in some problem domains, but it's not quite as simple as linked lists.

[FridgeSeal]

I just foresee it become irrevocably viral, as it becomes the “meh, easier” option, and then suddenly half your crates depend on it, and then you’re losing one of the major advantages of the language.