Rust

6137 readers

14 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 (1 children)

You agree with me so strongly that you started designing your own language?? Then why didn't you lead with that, since the post was asking for neolang recommendations??

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

Well the project never left its roots, it's a still a simple system-f implementation, and a lot of ideas. I've put it on ice, after seeing how much involved there is with questionable outcome (and I need to dedicate a good amount of time to get the theory right, it's not that I have year long research experience background in type-theory etc.). There's more concrete problems than designing yet another language... Maybe I'll come back to that project at some time.

Anyway the idea was to have something like Nix but more general (including derivations, possibly controlled side-effects). Closest to that currently would be typescripts object type, Haskell (overall static typing), crystal-langs union type and nickel (which is less ambitious (probably for good reason)).