Kotlin/JVM, Rust, and Randy Random

In this previous article I implemented a small, enterprisy benchmark to compare the concept of garbage collection used by Kotlin/JVM with the concept of Rust, which claims to not have any garbage collector at all. My conclusion was, that for a moderate increase in the complexity of the programming language the benchmark in Rust performed roughly 3 times faster than using Kotlin on the JVM. A colleague of mine, who uses Rust for some time now, looked at the code and gave me some hints for further speed improvements.

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Yes, Rust has Garbage Collection, and a Fast One

Rust is getting more and more popular. Thus, a group of colleagues, including myself, evaluated it for half a day to build up our own opinion, if Rust is of strategic interest for us or not. We did some coding following the standard introduction book, looked at some frameworks, and watched the presentation “Considering Rust”. The general conclusion was more or less in the line of: yeah, a nice new programming language, but without a full-grown ecosystem and without any garbage collection, it will be too cumbersome and unproductive for us in our projects. My gut feeling did not agree with the assessment regarding garbage collection. Thus, I did some more digging and testing and came up with my current conclusion: Rust does indeed garbage collection, but in a very clever way.

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