Survey of non-Rust implementations

[pliniker]

Papers

• Bacon's Unified theory - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf
• Immix - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/speedway/DaCapo/papers/immix-pldi-2008.pdf
• RCImmix - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/taking-off-the-gloves-with-reference-counting-immix/

Languages/VMs

If ergonomic integration with Rust is desirable, perhaps looking at languages that have good CFFI would be instructive?

• CPython - easy ref-counting cffi
• micropython - different tradeoffs for small runtime footprint
• CRuby - cffi with incremental tracing gc
• Lua 5
• LuaJIT - new gc
• Pony
• Go
• Elixir, BEAM and gc - immutable data
• GHC - immutable data

[CarePackage17]

What about Mono? I think game engine people would appreciate this a lot since C# in Unity is all the rage these days.

[brendanzab]

I think the idea (I could be mistaken) is more that we could look at these C APIs and see what they expose in order to get inspiration for an API for a VM that was built from scratch in Rust.

[brendanzab]

• V8
• SpiderMonkey

[erlend-sh]

Jonathan Blow’s Jai language for game development is very interesting:

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/jai-language-primer/3176
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/jai-language-primer/3176/20

[mamcx]

How about http://terralang.org? Is similar to https://luajit.org/dynasm.html and luajit under the help of lua + dsl.