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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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[–] bluGill@kbin.social 10 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Why would you want that? What is wrong with python if you want an interpreted language with garbage collection? By contrast what is wrong with rust + a lot of crates (or C++/Ada/...) if you want a compiled language?

Zero cost abstractions are great because speed is very important for complex problems. Little things here and there make for modern computers that feel slower than my old 8 bit atari when trying to get work done.

[–] porgamrer@programming.dev 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

There is a huge and valuable possibility space between python and Rust. We know this because it is already occupied by many extremely successful languages (Java, C#, Swift, etc).

The value of a language that sits between C# and Rust also seems pretty obvious at this point; a language that gives you Rust's memory management tools for optimisation, but doesn't force you to use them for all of your code.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It exists, it's called Rust with lots of Arc, .clone(), and Box<dyn Trait>. You don't have to borrow if you prefer to have a slower, easier program.

[–] philm@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

Box

Now try to do that with a trait that isn't object-safe...

I get your point, these things make fighting with the borrow-checker a little bit less annoying, but Rust is complex. I'll happily accept that because I value high code-quality (to that point that I rather invest more time to get things right) but when that is not the goal and you want something higher-level and strongly-typed there are alternatives that work better (I'm just talking about the language itself, ecosystem alone for me is yet another pro-Rust thing)

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