this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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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]
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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] 1 points 11 months ago

I do want to learn Haskell some day, but it seems like it has a whole different set of reasons why it's tricky to learn; and I hear enough about the more complex features (e.g. arrow notation) having compiler bugs that I think it really doesn't sound like a "smaller" or "simpler" language than Rust.

That said, yeah, it definitely meets the criteria of having strong typing, a functional style, a garbage collector, and pretty good performance.