CDPT: Concurrent Deferred Partial Tracing

CDPT is an automatic, safe, and concurrent garbage collector for Rust. It lets you build lock-free and concurrent data structures without manual memory reclamation, and without stop-the-world pauses, and it reclaims cyclic garbage automatically.

CDPT is based on partial tracing: it keeps reference counts only for the roots and reclaims the rest of the heap by tracing. This makes it safe (the roots are precise) and easy to use (tracing reclaims cycles for you). A highly concurrent design keeps it efficient: tracing runs concurrently with your threads, and deferred reference counting amortizes the root-count updates, so traversals touch no counts at all. The design, its correctness, and an evaluation are described in our PLDI 2026 paper.

Jeonghyeon Kim, Jongse Park, Youngjin Kwon, and Jeehoon Kang. 2026. Revisiting Partial Tracing for Safe, Efficient, and Concurrent Garbage Collection in Unmanaged Languages. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 10, PLDI, Article 232 (June 2026), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3808310

Shared references with Shared<T> and AtomicShared<T>

Shared<T> is CDPT's counterpart to std::sync::Arc<T>: an immutable, thread-safe reference that keeps a managed object alive. Unlike Arc<T>:

• Reference cycles between Shared<T>s are reclaimed automatically by the collector instead of leaking, so you never need weak references to break a cycle.
• It can be stored in an AtomicShared<T> (non-nullable) or AtomicSharedOption<T> (nullable), the atomic pointers used for the mutable edges of a concurrent data structure.
• Their store, swap, and compare_exchange operations apply the collector's write barriers for you, so updates stay safe while collection runs concurrently.

Efficient traversal with Local<'g, T>

You can traverse the managed heap without updating any reference counts. To access the heap, pin the current thread with cdpt::pin(), which returns a Guard. Pinning is cheap and does not exclude other threads: any number of threads may hold a guard at once, so a guard is nothing like a mutex.

let guard = cdpt::pin();
let node = some_atomic.load(Ordering::Acquire, &guard);
println!("{}", node.value); // `Local` dereferences to `&T`
// `guard` is dropped here, letting the collector make progress.

While the guard is held, loading an atomic edge returns a Local<'g, T>: an uncounted, temporary reference that dereferences to &T and stays valid for the guard's lifetime. A traversal is just a chain of such loads, so it never touches a reference count. To keep a reference past the guard, promote it to a Shared<T> (root-counted, sendable) or to a Local<'h, Handle, T> (hazard-pointer protected); both dereference freely, with no guard.

Automatic cycle collection

Because CDPT traces the heap, a group of objects that reference each other in a cycle is reclaimed automatically once the whole group becomes unreachable. You do not write weak references or break cycles by hand, as you would with plain reference counting. Cyclic data structures such as doubly linked lists and graphs work out of the box.

Comparison with other approaches

CDPT avoids the tradeoffs the other approaches make. Conservative tracing collectors such as BDWGC must stop the world and scan memory word by word. Reference counting (Arc<T>) and deferred reference counting (such as CIRC) avoid pauses, but they update a count on every internal edge, which slows write-heavy workloads that insert and remove nodes. Deferring those updates, as CIRC does, softens this cost without removing it, and neither reclaims cycles without weak references. CDPT counts only roots and traces the rest, so internal-edge writes stay cheap, cycles are still collected, and there are no pauses. In the paper's benchmarks it outperforms BDWGC and CIRC and is comparable to manual schemes such as epoch-based RCU and hazard pointers. See the paper for the full evaluation.

Example

Derive TraceObj, pin a guard, then allocate and dereference managed objects:

use cdpt::*;

#[derive(TraceObj)]
struct Node {
    value: usize,
    next: AtomicSharedOption<Node>,
}

// Pin the current thread to access the managed heap.
let handle = handle();
let guard = handle.pin();

// Allocate and dereference while the guard is alive.
let node = Local::new(Node { value: 42, next: AtomicSharedOption::none() }, &guard);
assert_eq!(node.value, 42); // `Local` dereferences to `&T`

// Promote to references that outlive the guard.
let kept = node.protect(&handle); // `Local<Handle, Node>`: cheap, this thread only
let shared = node.as_shared();    // `Shared<Node>`: root-counted, like `Arc`

drop(guard); // the collector can now make progress

assert_eq!(kept.value, 42);  // still valid
let alias = shared.clone();  // `Shared` is `Clone` + `Send + Sync`
assert_eq!(alias.value, 42); // still valid

More complete data structures (a Harris linked list, a hash map, and the Natarajan–Mittal and Ellen et al. trees) live in the examples/ directory.

Installation

Add CDPT to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
cdpt = "0.1"

Optional Cargo features:

• tag: low-bit pointer tagging (the *_with_tag and fetch_tag_* APIs), for lock-free algorithms that mark pointers.

API documentation is on docs.rs. For benchmarking, see BENCH.md.

Limitations

• No finalizers. When an object is reclaimed its fields are dropped normally, but you cannot run custom Drop logic on a managed type, and the timing of reclamation is not observable.
• No unboxing. Once a managed object becomes a heap edge of another object it cannot be moved back onto the stack; Shared<T> and Local<T> dereference to &T only.
• Send + Sync only. Managed objects are shared with other threads and the collector, so any interior-mutable state must use a thread-safe primitive (Mutex, atomics, and so on).
• Higher memory footprint. Tracing keeps garbage until the next cycle confirms it dead, and every object carries a small header, so peak memory is higher than hand-tuned manual reclamation.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.