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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Could you write 80-100% of an application in this language? I'm wondering if it could be a good application language for Rust programmers who want to use the Rust ecosystem and have the option of writing parts of their application in Rust for extra performance, but who also want to experiment and iterate quickly, and who want a simpler, higher-level language for expressing business logic.

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Hi! Author here. You could try but there are some fundamental limitations.

The biggest limitation is that we don't have access to the full type system of Rust. I don't think we can ever support registering generic types (e.g. you can register `Vec<u32>` but not `Vec<T>`) and you don't have access to traits. So it would work if you can reduce your API to concrete types.

Otherwise - apart from some missing features - you could probably write big chunks in Roto if you wanted to. You could also prototype things in Roto and then translate to Rust with some simplified types.

Also you'd have to accept that it gets compiled at runtime.

That’s my dream. Seamless FFI to Rust with all of the core in a dynamic scripting language. If/when you need to tighten up performance/types, can port more of the code to actual Rust.

That's my dream, but statically typed. Let programmers gloss over all the memory management stuff that makes writing Rust painstaking and complex (put everything on the heap by default if necessary.) Trade off runtime performance for faster iteration and simpler code. Still enjoy static typing, the Rust ecosystem, and the option to write parts of your code in Rust for maximum performance.

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