Two main papers about this topic AFAIK are:
«Counting Immutable Beans» by Sebastian Ullrich and Leonardo de Moura (
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.05647.pdf)
and
«Perceus: Garbage Free Reference Counting with Reuse» by Alex Reinking, Ningning Xie,Leonardo de Moura, Daan Leijen (
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3453483.3454032).
See also Anton Felix Lorenzen's master thesis: https://antonlorenzen.de/master_thesis_perceus_borrowing.pdf
Mr. Feldman also mentioned some «alias analysis» library «Morphic Solver» from Berkley University, but I cannot find anything about it.
BTW compile time reference counting was already discussed on HN, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567666
> Example: A linked list.
IIUC recursive data structures like linked list and trees are not the problem for the static reference counting. Mutation (and, therefore, link cycles) _is_ a problem, but Roc is a clean language with no explicit mutation. =)
> I can see so many basic cases in which it doesn't work
Sometimes runtime reference counting is still used. But, of course, in way more complex situations than just processing a linked list.
> Nitpick: Rc and Arc are not traits.
Of course, my fault. I haven't written on Rust for a long time (and never used this language in a serious project).
edit: link added
