For the past several days I have been looking for my next project. Here, I'll briefly discuss the video Rust: A Language for the Next 40 Years <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3AdN7U24iU>. The speaker is a member of rust's core development team at mozilla.
I highly recommend the first section, starting at 2:30, about the history of the railroad industry and the Federal Railroad Safety Appliance Act <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Safety_Appliance_Act>. Incredibly, railroads fought this legislation, though it (predictably) lead to *thousands *of fewer deaths among train crews *every year.* Ironically, this excellent video convinced me that rust is not going to be a big part of my future, for several reasons: 1. Rust is essentially a safer, *more *complex, version of C. As discussed in the video, there is a *gradual* pathway for migration from C or C++ to rust. However, I care nothing for the problems of those stuck with legacy C code. 2. The talk (dubiously!) assumes that garbage collection is a deal-breaker. But computers are *much* faster today than 40 years ago, so the number of legacy programs that *now* require native C performance is likely to be a *tiny *fraction of what it once was! 3. The video discusses the notion of a "person byte," the amount of data someone can comfortably deal with at a time. Alas, rust imposes a far greater mental load than does python! *Speed* One of Leo's "grand challenges" is to re-imagine Leo with an outline containing millions of nodes. Whether this challenge even makes sense is an open question. But one thing is clear: a speedup of 2-10 times would be inconsequential. Therefore, rust can not possibly be part of the solution. *Summary* Rust is never likely to be important for me or for Leo. Rust's complexity actively impedes high-level speculation. Rust remains an important language, both theoretically and practically. Rust can compile to web assembly, which means that rust programs can run natively in browsers. For this reason, there is considerable interest in pythonvm-rust <https://github.com/ProgVal/pythonvm-rust>. Otoh, pyodide <https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide>(a spin-off from mozilla) does not use rust. I am interested in rust's inference algorithm, and I may eventually get around to studying the algorithm in detail. Indeed, I am interested in extending Leo to make it easier to understand other programs. I have just had a breakthrough in this area, which I'll discuss in another post. Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/352fafd2-de81-4e2f-8fc1-5944f69e1ea1n%40googlegroups.com.
