Rust

5981 readers

36 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 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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] 0 points 10 months ago

Why would you want to prototype incorrect code? You don't fight with the borrow checker. The borrow checker prevents stupid mistakes. Anything that is correct that the borrow checker rejects is almost certainly a very bad idea in a prototype