For "classic" Rust what's actually nice is that no runtime is needed, so this looks like a step backwards.
What would be actually nice is running async Rust on the Go green threads runtime.
What would be actually nice is running async Rust on the Go green threads runtime.
Rust, of course superbly achieves its goals within its niche! But it is a niche, is my meaning here.
What I actually want is code that's correct, but ergonomic to write. So my ideal language (as strange as it sounds) would be Rust with a GC.
I don't want to worry about what string type I'm using. I want it to just work. But I want it to work correctly.
Lisette looks like it's in this exact category! It seems to combine the best aspects of both Rust and Go, which is a very promising endeavour. I'll have to take a proper look :)
Having great tools. Excellent documentation. Being friendly to new users.
Yes, it's also a systems language without a runtime. But that's not the novel part. You could write horrors in C++ that approximate ML even without language support. There are eldritch libraries where some kind of pattern matching is done via generic lambdas.
The main difference is developper UX. Good tools, good error messages, quality of life. The novelty is making ML not painful.
Low level strong correctness was absolutely a novel part. In fact it’s exactly why many people glommed onto early rust, and why it was lowered on the stack.
Although learnability and weirdness budgets were also extremely novel in low level contexts which had been subsumed by C and C++.
> horrors in C++
Yes, horrors in C++. Half baked jerry-rigged and barely usable nonsense. Not an industrial strength langage with a reliable type system and a strong focus on safety through types.
Being memory safe without being managed is what makes rust a truly novel and interesting language for which it rightfully gets the hype.
Still, where absolute max performance or realtime are not required, I'd choose OCaml as it is elegant & a pleasure to code in (personal opinion, ymmv).
There's also the support for concurrency and parallelism, which has started to improve recently, but is still years behind what is available in Go (but still better in my opinion than what is available in Rust).
I can expand on any of those if you disagree with them.
When did OCaml get affine types? Or unique references?
They support native target (as well as js target) but wasm one was always the primary one.
Having said that they have (cooperative) async for native target only currently.
Personally I'm looking forward for them to self host it – not sure why they're still holding to ocaml compiler, the language seems sufficient to have moonbit written in moonbit. Together with it I'm waiting for proper open source – currently what the team is doing is a bit like what Meta sometimes does – internal development, no community development, they just dump updates as snapshots from time to time instead of normal, fully open development.
I'm also clinging on my last intel purchase (macbook pro) and unfortunatelly they don't provide intel builds for macOS just arm ones (even though they do for linux), which is a bit of a pain – but I think I'll just buy arm macbook before they'll support intel on macOS (and maybe they'll never do, which is fair). It's a small thing from moonbit perspective, but annoying and limiting a bit for me personally to work remotely only with it.
if I can incorporate Lisette into my golang projects for example, (Invoking rust code within Golang to me feels like a larger problem and Invoking C might be easier from my tinkering experiments) I feel like you are viewing this from a pure performance metric but to be honest, most things aren't necessary to be the fastest, the type system of rust/rust-alike languages can be beneficial to people as-it-is
Check out gleam, its based on erlang so it has a runtime involved, people love gleam because it gives them a bit more expressiveness in the type system from what I've heard.
I feel like these experiments are genuinely nice, Also perhaps a project like this can then slowly also invoke tinyGo (there was a recent discussion about it too) and could be compiled into tinyGo in future iterations to have no runtime essentially as well. People who love rust, love it, but most people really find it hard to get-into as compared to golang, I really love golang for its simplicity but I wish to tinker with rust too, so if Lisette combines both of these things and atleast makes me familiar with more rust without having to jump into too many hoops