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

Rust

6046 readers
6 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
[–] philm@programming.dev 4 points 10 months ago

have an even cleaner architecture

Although I'm fully in camp functional, I doubt that. There are problems that are inherently stateful and rely on mutability. Modelling that in Haskell often results in unnecessary abstractions. I think Rust hits a sweet spot here (when you're that experienced to write idiomatic Rust, whatever that exactly is). Also being lazy by default has its own (performance) implications, strict + lazy iterators (like Rust) is a good default IMO.