RcLite: The small reference counting solution for Rust

RcLite is a lightweight reference-counting solution for Rust that serves as an alternative to the standard library's reference-counting. It offers both multi-threaded and single-threaded reference counting options with improved performance and reduced memory overhead, boasting a 75% decrease in memory usage compared to the standard reference counting method. RcLite is a suitable option when weak references are not necessary and optimizing for performance and memory usage is a priority.

Why use RcLite?

• It's faster and smaller
• Uses less memory
• It is a drop-in replacement for standard library Arc and Rc without weak reference feature
• It supports no_std with extern alloc

Why not use RcLite?

• It does not provide weak references
• With RcLite in 64-bit systems, you only can have 4,294,967,296 - 256 live references to an object. if you need to have 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 live references to an object, use the standard library. In other systems with smaller pointer sizes like 32-bit, you will have usize::MAX live references limitation that is the same as the standard library.

Comparison

| | rclite::Arc | std::sync::Arc | | -------------------------- | :---------: | :------------: | | Overhead in 64-bit systems | 4 bytes | 16 bytes | | Overhead in 32-bit systems | 4 bytes | 8 bytes | | Overhead in 16-bit systems | 2 bytes | 4 bytes | | Weak References | ❌ | ✅ |