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 BatmanAoD@programming.dev to c/rust@programming.dev
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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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[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

Honestly, prototyping is exactly the kind of thing where I don't want to think about all the crap that Python doesn't check itself while Rust does. In a long-term project I could begrudgingly learn every data structure and process well enough to do the compiler's job for it but if the code is very new or changes constantly I want as much support from the compiler as possible to avoid having to remember all of that.