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Computer Science > Software Engineering

arXiv:2110.01098 (cs)
[Submitted on 3 Oct 2021]

Title:Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use? A
Controlled Experiment

Authors:Michael Coblenz, Michelle Mazurek, Michael Hicks
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    Abstract: Rust is a general-purpose programming language that is
    both type- and memory-safe. Rust does not use a garbage
    collector, but rather achieves these properties through a
    sophisticated, but complex, type system. Doing so makes Rust very
    efficient, but makes Rust relatively hard to learn and use. We
    designed Bronze, an optional, library-based garbage collector for
    Rust. To see whether Bronze could make Rust more usable, we
    conducted a randomized controlled trial with volunteers from a
    633-person class, collecting data from 428 students in total. We
    found that for a task that required managing complex aliasing,
    Bronze users were more likely to complete the task in the time
    available, and those who did so required only about a third as
    much time (4 hours vs. 12 hours). We found no significant
    difference in total time, even though Bronze users re-did the
    task without Bronze afterward. Surveys indicated that ownership,
    borrowing, and lifetimes were primary causes of the challenges
    that users faced when using Rust.

Comments:    11 pages, 8 figures
Subjects:    Software Engineering (cs.SE); Programming Languages
             (cs.PL)
ACM classes: D.2.3; D.1.0
Cite as:     arXiv:2110.01098 [cs.SE]
             (or arXiv:2110.01098v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

Submission history

From: Michael Coblenz [view email]
[v1] Sun, 3 Oct 2021 20:26:24 UTC (328 KB)
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