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Comment by verdagon | Hacker News Reader

Figuring out how to make this was a pretty wild ride. I had zero clue how to approach this, so I went into the mountains with pencil and paper until I figured something out.

I started with a sort of "compile-time generational references" approach, where every reference would also remember when it was made, at compile-time. Then that evolved into a couple more things until I finally figured out this reverse approach. We'll see if it sticks.

Hope you all enjoy!

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Seems to me you did what any engineer worth his salt would do: sit down and look at the underlying mechanisms, to map the problem, and then highly efficient solutions present themselves. It's amazing to me no one seems to have done this before.

That raises the question why did Rust pivot to lifetimes? It was a bias towards theory? Or they just missed the simplication of their model? So they exited the problem space too early, happy to have found a solution?

I sure am happy to see this non-dogmatic thinking, many blessings are to come of it. It seems we are getting closer to the "final language", and languages become a solved problem.

> Seems to me you did what any engineer worth his salt would do: sit down and look at the underlying mechanisms, to map the problem, and then highly efficient solutions present themselves.

Truer words were never spoken.

> It's amazing to me no one seems to have done this before.

You would be surprised how many valuable problems and solutions have not been solved by anyone before. Apparently, it happens to be the norm in the wild. My understanding is that it's about how far one is willing to strive for an ideal.

> It seems we are getting closer to the "final language", and languages become a solved problem.

A final language? I like the sound of it. No more picking complexity, latency, simplicity, expressiveness, portability and other tradeoffs.

> > It seems we are getting closer to the "final language", and languages become a solved problem. > > A final language? I like the sound of it. No more picking complexity, latency, simplicity, expressiveness, portability and other tradeoffs.

This sound to me like havin a single tool. Only a hammer and every problem looks like a nail...

Exactly. The old wisdom may not be 100% true after all.

Composed of the right primitives at sufficient granularity, we may yet approach the one true hammer :)

If you consider that a hammers job is to bump into things with force, essentially everything at every scale becomes a hammer

> why did Rust pivot to lifetimes

not sure if this is the reason, but imo it's a way to express this without requiring to know the implementation details of abstractions

Out of curiosity, have you looked into capture checking from Scala? It's proposed as a generalization of the rust borrow checker, to handle capabilities and other side-effectful computations (error handling, asynchrony, ...) in an ergonomic manner. Not sure if/how much cross-pollination there might be :-)

https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/ca...

Looked around your blog. Awesome work.

A lot of developer rituals can be avoided for obvious cases (of multiple writes to the same variable) leading to clean code. Your Valen looks promising.

I learnt, while reading your blogs, that rustc can run embedded - which might come in handy for one of our projects, Craft, for embedded compiling + uploading on mobile.

We have built arcc (architectural compiler/linter) which enforces architectural rules for correctness like strict CQRS separation and other 10+ architectural rules at compile time. Currently, arcc is for TypeScript/JS codebase. Future scope is on Rust codebases.

> Then that evolved into a couple more things until I finally figured out this reverse approach. We'll see if it sticks.

The way you phrased that sentence, something tells me that it sticks. Reading tea leaves: compressed in those sentences somewhere is an insight you have which you are damn sure of, while deliberately withholding it and thinking it through before you guarantee it yourself. Did my tea leaves fail me :).

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