Meta Garbage Collection: Using OCaml's GC to GC Rust

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Soteria is a powerful bug detection tool that reliably and consistently finds bugs in your Rust and C codebase at unmatched speed using symbolic execution.

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Back to Blog Meta Garbage Collection: Using OCaml’s GC to GC Rust Tracking Rust’s aliasing model can be quadratically expensive if done naively. Learn how we fixed this in Soteria Rust by doing meta garbage collection. Opale Sjöstedt, Principal Engineer · 20 July 2026

RSS Soteria Rust is a symbolic execution tool for verifying Rust programs; it explores every execution path , catching undefined behaviour, aliasing errors, and more. We recently noticed something odd: a simple loop that increments a variable N times was taking quadratic time in N !

The culprit was our implementation of Tree Borrows , Rust’s latest and most advanced aliasing model. The fix ended up being surprisingly simple: because Soteria is written in OCaml, we can delegate the garbage collection of Tree Borrows’ state to OCaml’s garbage collector. In about 40 lines of code, we went from quadratic to linear time , with up to a 10x speedup !

Finding the Culprit Let’s look at the example that made us notice the problem: a simple benchmark in which we take a mutable reference r , read it once (into _old ), reset it to …

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