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 which requires about 32GBs of ram for holding all these references to this single object location. 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 | ❌ | ✅ |