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This post is auto-generated from RSS feed The Rust Programming Language Forum - Latest topics. Source: Imagining a Rusty scripting language

From time to time I've a little curiosity with Rusty scripting languages.

I've seen this Karina language recently which is a Rusty one that targets the JVM, but it's far from complete.

What I would like in a Rusty scripting language is...

• Fast compile times just like regular scripting languages
• Enum variants tagged with a string (e.g. Variant = "variant") and a number simultaneously (e.g. Variant = ("variant", 0)).
  • Tagging a variant with a string seems useful for markup like in React.js/JSX (e.g. <s:Component1 variant="normal"/>) and occasional type inference, too.
• Built-in JSX-like feature
• Defaults to garbage collection
• struct inheritance is said to be an anti-pattern, but it's useful for certain corner cases (like implementing DOM nodes and their event model (e.g. to avoid an additional "detail" parameter on event listeners)).
  • Event declaration (i.e. events that are possibly dispatched by a struct), allowing for type inference when listening to events and perhaps dispatching events.

JSX-like feature

For a compiler to work, it may have to rely on specific host APIs. For example, TypeScript tsc supports React.js-tied JSX markup which targets the React.js API (by default specifically for the WHATWG DOM). A potential scripting Rusty compiler would need to target a number of different technologies as well with its own markup capabilities.

As to markup syntax, people seem to argue that Dioxus's default template engine looks more efficient to type:

rsx! {
    Component1 {
        x = 10
    }
}

I prefer a XML-like or JSX-like way because its structure seems a little cleaner, although it requires closing tags when an element is non-empty. (Here's where is required a nice IDE support.)

Unlike React.js, I'd rather not rely on a separate styled-components package and support multiple CSS blocks out of the box, scoped to a markup's tag.

xml! {
    <w:HGroup>
        <w:Style>
            r###"
                :host {
                    background: red;
                }
            "###
        </w:Style>
    </w:HGroup>
}

In this case w would be a native prefix identifying the framework (e.g. Whack) and other prefixes are simply identifying Rusty modules.

Target

More native as possible. For a framework target wasm and rely on things like skia-safe and wgpu.

Implementing anything so far?

No, I don't understand bidirectional type checking at all, so I'm paralyzed for now, and I also am not sure I want a "Rusty" language (too complex to implement (e.g. decl and proc macros) and there are some feature tradeoffs compared to the other dialect I like).

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