this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
34 points (87.0% liked)

Rust

5981 readers
47 users here now

Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.

Wormhole

!performance@programming.dev

Credits

  • The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
EdTheLegendary@programming.dev
kahnclusions@programming.dev
torcherist@programming.dev
34
Who's working on a "smaller Rust"? (programming.dev)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by BatmanAoD@programming.dev to c/rust@programming.dev
63 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Almost five years ago, Saoirse "boats" wrote "Notes on a smaller Rust", and a year after that, revisited the idea.

The basic idea is a language that is highly inspired by Rust but doesn't have the strict constraint of being a "systems" language in the vein of C and C++; in particular, it can have a nontrivial (or "thick") runtime and doesn't need to limit itself to "zero-cost" abstractions.

What languages are being designed that fit this description? I've seen a few scripting languages written in Rust on GitHub, but none of them have been very active. I also recently learned about Hylo, which does have some ideas that I think are promising, but it seems too syntactically alien to really be a "smaller Rust."

Edit to add: I think Graydon Hoare's post about language design choices he would have preferred for Rust also sheds some light on the kind of things a hypothetical "Rust-like but not Rust" language could do differently: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 months ago

Honestly, prototyping is exactly the kind of thing where I don't want to think about all the crap that Python doesn't check itself while Rust does. In a long-term project I could begrudgingly learn every data structure and process well enough to do the compiler's job for it but if the code is very new or changes constantly I want as much support from the compiler as possible to avoid having to remember all of that.