For a while I’ve been wondering what it would be like to use arenas in Rust. In C and C++ I have been turning to arenas more and more as a fast alternative to heap allocation. If you have a bunch of objects that share a common lifetime, arenas offer cheaper allocation and much cheaper deallocation than the heap. The more I use this pattern, the more it feels downright wasteful to use heap allocation when an arena would do. I’ve been wanting to know how arenas would play with Rust’s life...
