Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you do not want to mess with Rust borrow checker, you do not really need a garbage collector: you can rely on Rust reference counting. Use 1.) Rust reference-counted smart pointers[1] for shareable immutable references and 2.) Rust internal mutability[2] for non-shareable mutable references checked at runtime instead of compile time. Effectively, you will be writing kind of verbose Golang with Rust's expressivenes…
Can you help me understand when to use Rc instead of Arc (atomic reference counter)? Edit: Googled it. Found an answer: > The only distinction between Arc and Rc is that the former is very slightly more expensive, but the latter is not thread-safe.
An Arc is an Rc that uses an atomic integer for its ref count. This ensures updates to its count are safe between threads, so the Arc can thus be shared between threads. In practice the two become identical assembly, at least on amd64 because most load and stores have memory ordering guarantees, but on other architectures the atomics can in fact be a tad slower. marking the operations as atomic also prevents the compiler from doing instruction reordering that might cause problems