I've been thinking a lot about a solution to Rust's notoriously slow compile times. From my research, it's not the borrow checker that is the issue, it's the heavy optimizations and monomorphization, and macro expansion [0]. There are efforts to improve Rust compile times, but I realized recently that it will never be lightning fast, so we (Rust users) should really be developing more scripting languages and DSLs that we can put all of the fiddly bits into.
Places where we would benefit the most from this is in the Games and UI space. I know game devs have already started by integrating lua, like with mlua [1]. In the UI space i think Makepad is the best example of a team making a dedicated DSL that can be hot-reloaded [2].
I think we need more of this! Go make a DSL next time you feel crushed by the weight of compiling Rust crates!
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[0] and by my research i mean Claude. this is a great blog with many posts about improving compile times https://nnethercote.github.io/
[1] https://crates.io/crates/mlua . I don't have a reference for a project using it though so please reply if you know of one!
> I do not know if it is me being bored with the project, or annoyed with having to build and design a data structure, that has soured me on this project. But I have really at this point lost most motivation to continue this chapter. The way Zig is designed, it makes me deal with the data structure and memory management complexity head on, and it is tiresome. It is not "simpler" than, say, Rust: it just leaves the programmer to deal with the complexity, <strike-through>gaslighting the user</strike-through> claiming it is absolutely necessary.
love to hear good news even if it's a relatively small sample size. anecdotal, but i've heard that the antioxidants in fresh ground coffee is also very good!
not sure why the title was renamed, but i thought this was interesting primarily because it's the early work of Rich Hickey, famous for making the Clojure language.