this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Who's working on a "smaller Rust"? (programming.dev)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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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[โ€“] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My understanding was that there's some ecosystem bifurcation, somewhat like Rust's. But I'll look into it again!

[โ€“] ericjmorey@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago

Oh, yeah. The Jane Street vs non-Jane Street library incompatibilities still exist. But there is a new concurrency library that was made such that the need to use monads has been eliminated.