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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 (1 children)

can have a nontrivial (or “thick”) runtime and doesn’t need to limit itself to “zero-cost” abstractions.

Wouldn't that be a bigger rust rather than a smaller one?

Not an area I'm particularly interested in, given that I do embedded and hard realtime development. Rust is the best language for that now, I just which allocations were fallible as well. And storage/allocator API was stabilised.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Not unless you consider Go a "bigger" language than Rust. The blog post means "smaller" in terms of what the user has to learn and think about, rather than smaller in implementation size or resulting binary.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (8 children)

If you want a high-level, convenient Rust, it's already there: It's Rust with liberal use of Arc and .clone() and Box and so on. If you want things to be convenient instead of efficient, Rust already has everything you need.

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