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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[-] Vorpal@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

can have a nontrivial (or “thick”) runtime and doesn’t need to limit itself to “zero-cost” abstractions.

Wouldn't that be a bigger rust rather than a smaller one?

Not an area I'm particularly interested in, given that I do embedded and hard realtime development. Rust is the best language for that now, I just which allocations were fallible as well. And storage/allocator API was stabilised.

[-] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

Not unless you consider Go a "bigger" language than Rust. The blog post means "smaller" in terms of what the user has to learn and think about, rather than smaller in implementation size or resulting binary.

[-] Vorpal@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

I would indeed consider Go a bigger language, because I do indeed think in terms of the size of the runtime.

But your way of defining it also makes sense. Though in those terms I have no idea if Go is smaller or not (as I don't know Go).

But Rust is still a small language by this definition, compared to for example C++ (which my day job still involves to a large extent). It is also much smaller than Python (much smaller standard library to learn). Definitely smaller than Haskell. Smaller than C I would argue (since there are leas footguns to keep in mind), though C has a smaller standard library to learn.

What other languages do I know... Erlang, hm again the standard library is pretty big, so rust is smaller or similar size I would argue. Shell script? Well arguably all the Unix commands are the standard library, so that would make shell script pretty big.

So yeah, rust is still a pretty small language compared to all other languages I know. Unsafe rust probably isn't, but I have yet to need to write any (except one line to work around AsRawFd vs AsFd mismatch between two libraries).

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[-] crispy_kilt@feddit.de -1 points 11 months ago

If you want a high-level, convenient Rust, it's already there: It's Rust with liberal use of Arc and .clone() and Box and so on. If you want things to be convenient instead of efficient, Rust already has everything you need.