
The road ahead for Rust - icey
http://pcwalton.blogspot.com/2011/04/road-ahead-for-rust.html
======
pkmays
When the author talks about missing features, is he referring to the new self-
hosting compiler only? I remember skimming thru the PDF manual when I first
heard about Rust, and I'd find it alarming if stuff like deterministic garbage
collection and stack growth have been documented but not actually implemented.

~~~
pcwalton
Garbage collection isn't implemented; we're relying on reference counting for
now. The self-hosted compiler has no cyclic data structures, so we're fine.

Stack growth _was_ implemented at one point, but we disabled it because the
way it was implemented was a proof-of-concept hack (it just rewrote anything
that looked like a pointer on the stack). I suspect we're going to switch to a
more Go-like model, in which stack growth happens by calling through a stack-
switching thunk.

------
nickik
What kind of of macros do you think about?

~~~
pcwalton
Too early to say - this is probably the one part of the language that has had
the least design work - but I suspect they'll feel like Dylan's macros. That
is, Lisp/Scheme-inspired, but tailored to a C-like syntax.

~~~
nickik
Ah very very cool. I was think about saying something about dylan (the PLOT
language by Dave Moon is something too look at too). Dylan has a BASIC like
syntax do you think this will be easy to adopt to C like syntax? Is the C
syntax set?

I really like what I see with Rust. Keep up the good work.

~~~
pcwalton
I don't foresee many problems with adopting Dylan-like macros to the C syntax
(they're both Algol-derived anyhow), but again this is all up in the air :)

The C syntax is pretty much set. Switching at this state would do more harm
than good, and we think that in the long term syntax is less important than
semantics.

