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

    • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
      0·
      1 year ago

      I guess we’re coming at this with different opinions on what is convenient. Python is extremely easy and quick to write - but then writing more code for tests than the actual program itself because the compiler catches next to nothing and still dealing with the occasional runtime error is highly inconvenient to me. I look at the “ease of use” - or painlessness if you will - of a programming language over the whole lifecycle of the program, not just initially writing it.

      Initial development is like 2% of the total effort over the whole lifecycle of a program, at most. The vast majority of time is refactoring, troubleshooting, changing, testing, building, deploying, monitoring… and so on. With Rusts strong type system, I will probably spend 30% more time developing than with an easier language like Python/Go/Kotlin, but I will save 300% of time debugging, troubleshooting, deploying. Moreover, writing code is something I enjoy, while debugging is something I’d rather avoid. Any language that enables me to spend less time teoubleshooting runtime errors and debugging edge cases is a desirable language for me.

      What would you consider a convenient language, and why?