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.

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@inproceedings{coblenz21bronze,
  title = {Does the Bronze Garbage Collector Make Rust Easier to Use? A Controlled Experiment},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)},
  author = {Michael Coblenz and Michelle Mazurek and Michael Hicks},
  year = {2022},
  month = may,
  note = {\textbf{Distinguished Paper Award Nominee}}
}

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