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0 pointstialaramex8mo ago0 comments

Originally Rust is something altogether different. Graydon has written about that extensively. Graydon wanted tail calls, reflection, more "natural" arithmetic with Python style automatic big numbers, decimal for financial work and so on.

The Rust we have from 1.0 onwards is not what Graydon wanted at all. Would Graydon's language have been broadly popular? Probably not, we'll never know.

0 comments

kibwen8mo ago

Even in pre-1.0 Rust, concurrency was a primary goal; there's a reason that Graydon listed Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo, and Erlang in the long list of influences for proto-Rust.

fmajid8mo ago

And yet it ignored the primary lesson of Erlang: no shared memory access whatsoever, which is what makes it so robust.

littlestymaar8mo ago

Because the other teams members (IIRC brson and pcwalton) wanted Rust to be as performant as C++, which means you must have a way to have shared memory.

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nine_k8mo ago

While at it, I suppose it's straightforward to implement arbitrary-precision integers and decimals in today's Rust; there are several crates for that. There's also a `tailcall` crate that apparently implements TCO [1].

[1]: https://docs.rs/tailcall/latest/tailcall/

tialaramexOP8mo ago

Oh, I do know you can have arbitrary precision. I'm the author of realistic, which isn't "just" arbitrary precision it's an approximation of the computable reals as well, which is sometimes just enough more power than you'd hardly notice you have arbitrary precision too.

https://crates.io/crates/realistic

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