Rust

6133 readers

22 users here now

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

Wormhole

[email protected]

Credits

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

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

The biggest difference I see is allowing multiple mutable borrows, which would make a lot of things easier, but aside from that it sounds like it would have most of the same usability problems as Rust.

I'm also a bit put off when I see LLVM advertised as the primary compiler back-end these days. Pretty much guarantees slow builds.