Extendable GC structures

[hydroper1]

I insist, why not support optional garbage collected struct(gc) that can inherit another struct(gc) (which can take advantage of WebAssembly reference types)? I find myself often limited, being unable to express some inheritances. The main use-cases are UI and compiler semantic model Symbol.

The current workaround is making your own personal Any and providing explicit covariant conversion methods to every subtype, however this workaround is unable to inherit fields, thus, when implementing, for example, UI components, you need to reimplement methods such as add_child(...) etc. to some subtypes, due to supertype trait being unable to store fields.

So struct(gc) should at least support:

• Inheriting another struct(gc)
• is-subtype-test
• Covariant conversion
• Contravariant conversion
• Overriding instance method
• super.f();

Restrictions:

• struct(gc) is only allowed if the runtime garbage collector is allowed. So this would likely require a compiler option, like --use-gc.

Not important:

• Weak
• WeakMap

[bjorn3]

Retrofitting a GC into a non-GC language is non-trivial. Especially handling rooting is hard to do in a way that is compatible with existing code. @Manishearth has written several posts about GC support for Rust. For example A Tour of Safe Tracing GC Designs in Rust - In Pursuit of Laziness and Designing a GC in Rust - In Pursuit of Laziness.

[bjorn3]

@hydroper1

• Inheriting another struct(gc)
• is-subtype-test
• Covariant conversion
• Contravariant conversion
• Overriding instance method
• super.f();

These things are all totally unrelated to GC support. Rust doesn't support these things as it favors composition over inheritance. People coming from C++ have often asked for inheritance to be added, for example in Adding true OO capabilities to Rust. We have deliberately avoided adding support for as it generally leads to messier code than when using composition.

Adding true OO capabilities to Rust

All the languages you listed implement OO in different ways, with very different semantics. You should be more specific what you want. Having OO in some other language also doesn't mean that it will fit in Rust with its design constraints (zero-cost abstractions, correctness by construction, explicitness), so saying "these things were discussed many times" doesn't help anyone. You need to make case why specific features are a good addition to Rust as it stands. I'll also note that there is ple…

[hydroper1]

I've suggested earlier about Rc in place of Gc, but no one seems to support the idea. I always knew about composition-over-inheritance favour, but I'm in need of inheritance for things like UI (and it's also useful for writting semantic model for language compilers, although I'm not interested on this right now).

[bjorn3]

@hydroper1

but I'm in need of inheritance for things like UI

Yeah, rust doesn't have the best gui support right now. There are a dozen of crates experimenting with non-inheritance based models. As for an immediate need you probably have, maybe you could do something like gtk-rs does?

@hydroper1

and it's also useful for writting semantic model for language compilers, although I'm not interested on this right now

Enums should be fine for compiler usage as the set of syntax elements that can occur at any given place is fixed. This is what rustc itself does.