@davidcrawshaw: While the industry is pouring resources into programs without GC (rust), I think the Jane Street OCaml folks have it fi…
Summary
David Crawshaw argues that while the industry invests in Rust's lack of GC, Jane Street's OCaml with OxCaml demonstrates that GC is beneficial for most code paths, with only 1% needing performance optimization.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 05/16/26, 11:24 PM
While the industry is pouring resources into programs without GC (rust), I think the Jane Street OCaml folks have it figured out with OxCaml.
Almost all your code paths are cold and GC is net positive. 1% of your code is performance sensitive. Don’t create GC pressure there.
Similar Articles
Data race freedom in OxCaml
OxCaml, Jane Street's fork of the OCaml compiler, introduces compile-time guarantees against data races, enabling sequential consistency without runtime overhead. The blog post explains the new mode axes and their implications for parallel programming.
The Edge of Safe Rust
A TokioConf 2026 talk/blog post explores pushing safe Rust to its limits by implementing tracing garbage collection for complex pointer structures, sharing techniques for circular references and raw-pointer GC design.
Performance of Rust language
This talk analyzes Rust's performance strengths and weaknesses compared to C++, providing benchmarks and best practices. Slides and reading materials are available.
@npashi: Finally able to talk about what I've been heads-down on for 6 months at @nvidia We just open-sourced cuda-oxide — an ex…
NVIDIA has open-sourced cuda-oxide, an experimental rustc backend that allows developers to write CUDA kernels directly in pure Rust without DSLs, FFI, or source-to-source translation.
Garbage Collection Without Unsafe Code
safe-gc is a new Rust crate that provides a garbage collector implemented entirely without unsafe code, using heap-indexing instead of direct pointer dereferencing to maintain memory safety.