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Who's working on a "smaller Rust"? (programming.dev)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (16 children)

You mean a interpretative language with similar role to Python, but more like Rust/C++ style? I actually want that so that I can ditch Python even if I learned it and use this instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (15 children)

Not necessarily interpreted, but possibly. I think a more likely path is something like Go that's compiled but still has a garbage collector.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (12 children)

If you use a garbage collector the whole borrow checker would not make any sense.

Do you want to have error handling and functional paradigms in go? I think you should start there and ask go Devs why their language is lacking such basic stuff.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I spend an inordinate amount of time at my C# day job adding documentation comments about exclusive access and lifetimes and ownership… things which are clearly important but which dotnet provides little or no useful support for, even though it has a perfectly good garbage collector. The dotnet devs were well aware that garbage collection has its limits, especially when interacting with resources managed outside of the runtime, and so they added language features like IDisposable and finalisers and GCHandle and SafeHandle and so on to fix some of the things GC won’t be doing for you.

I’d happily use a garbage collected language with borrow checking.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago

Sounds like you're using C# for something that it wasn't designed for. You can, of course, but it is obviously painful

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