So there has been a lot of really interesting discussion in response to my blog post. I wanted to highlight some of the comments I’ve seen, because I think they raise good points that I failed to address in the blog post itself. My comments here are lightly edited versions of what I wrote elsewhere.

Isn’t the problem with objects and leak-safe types more general?

Reem writes:

I posit that this is in fact a problem with trait objects, not a problem with Leak; the exact same flaw pointed about in the blog post already applies to the existing OIBITs, Send, Sync, and Reflect. The decision of which OIBITs to include on any trait object is already a difficult one, and is a large reason why std strives to avoid trait objects as part of public types.

I agree with him that the problems I described around Leak and objects apply equally to Send (and, in fact, I said so in my post), but I don’t think this is something we’ll be able to solve later on, as he suggests. I think we are working with something of a fundamental tension. Specifically, objects are all about encapsulation. That is, they completely hide the type you are working with, even from the compiler. This is what makes them useful: without them, Rust just plain wouldn’t work, since you couldn’t (e.g.) have a vector of closures. But, in order to gain that flexibility, you have to state your requirements up front. The compiler can’t figure them out automatically, because it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) know the types involved.

So, given that objects are here to stay, the question is whether adding a marker trait like Leak is a problem, given that we already have Send . I think the answer is yes; basically, because we can’t expect object types to be analyzed statically, we should do our best to minimize the number of fundamental splits people have to work with. Thread safety is pretty fundamental. I don’t think Leak makes the cut. (I said some of the reasons in conclusion of my previous blog post, but I have a few more in the questions below.)

Could we just remove Rc and only have RcScoped ? Would that solve the problem?

Original question.

Certainly you could remove Rc in favor of RcScoped . Similarly, you could have only Arc and not Rc . But you don’t want to because you are basically failing to take advantage of extra constraints. If we only had RcScoped , for example, then creating an Rc always requires taking some scoped as argument – you can have a global constant for 'static data, but it’s still the case that generic abstractions have to take in this scope as argument. Moreover, there is a runtime cost to maintaining the extra linked list that will thread through all Rc abstractions (and the Rc structs get bigger, as well). So, yes, this avoids the “split” I talked about, but it does it by pushing the worst case on all users.

Still, I admit to feeling torn on this point. What pushes me over the edge, I think, is that simple reference counting of the kind we are doing now is a pretty fundamental thing. You find it in all kinds of systems (Objective C, COM, etc). This means that if we require that safe Rust cannot leak, then you cannot safely integrate borrowed data with those systems. I think it’s better to just use closures in Rust code – particularly since, as annodomini points out on Reddit, there are other kinds of cases where RAII is a poor fit for cleanup.

Could a proper GC solve this? Is reference counting really worth it?

Original question.