Well the project never left its roots, it’s a still a simple system-f implementation, and a lot of ideas. I’ve put it on ice, after seeing how much involved there is with questionable outcome (and I need to dedicate a good amount of time to get the theory right, it’s not that I have year long research experience background in type-theory etc.). There’s more concrete problems than designing yet another language… Maybe I’ll come back to that project at some time.

Anyway the idea was to have something like Nix but more general (including derivations, possibly controlled side-effects). Closest to that currently would be typescripts object type, Haskell (overall static typing), crystal-langs union type and nickel (which is less ambitious (probably for good reason)).

“Faster/easier/less mental overhead” is indeed exactly what I mean by “convenient”.

How different the conception of convenient is :P

I think it’s super convenient to just do cargo new <project>, start hacking, have superb tooling/expressiveness/performance etc. And it works remarkably well and fast if the problem space is not self-referential etc. or a lot of mutability is in play (I’m probably faster in Rust now than in python, but that probably has to do with the amount of time I’m spending with it…). But I get your point, and I think there’s certainly better languages for certain problems (and I even started one myself some time ago, because I wanted something like Nix but with strong typing (anonymous sum/union types/sets etc. similar as typescript))

Box<dyn Trait>

Now try to do that with a trait that isn’t object-safe…

I get your point, these things make fighting with the borrow-checker a little bit less annoying, but Rust is complex. I’ll happily accept that because I value high code-quality (to that point that I rather invest more time to get things right) but when that is not the goal and you want something higher-level and strongly-typed there are alternatives that work better (I’m just talking about the language itself, ecosystem alone for me is yet another pro-Rust thing)

What is a convenient language exactly?

Although I think the arguments are not exactly pro-Rust (they already show complexity with something like Box<dyn Trait>).

Sure hacking something quickly together with python is quite a bit faster/easier/less mental overhead.

But long-term and IDE experience IMO Rust is the most convenient language (mind you I programmed in ~10-20 languages, and the whole DX is best with Rust IMO (cargo, rust-analyzer etc.)), as it forces you to write a clean architecture and the strong type system keeps it maintainable. While refactoring can feel cumbersome, I almost always had a clean and working/correct (often without tests) code afterwards (when all the compiler errors are fixed).

That said Rust is of course not perfect, all the strong-typing, zero-cost (async is certainly not something I would recommend beginners) systems-programming features make it complex at times (and the type-system can get in the way at times, e.g. trait-object-safety, or not “simple” higher-kinded types). So when that is annoying and control over the exact memory is not that important, something like OCAML or Haskell may be better.

have an even cleaner architecture

Although I’m fully in camp functional, I doubt that. There are problems that are inherently stateful and rely on mutability. Modelling that in Haskell often results in unnecessary abstractions. I think Rust hits a sweet spot here (when you’re that experienced to write idiomatic Rust, whatever that exactly is). Also being lazy by default has its own (performance) implications, strict + lazy iterators (like Rust) is a good default IMO.

Yeah, but unironic…

If your code needs comments, it’s either because it’s unnecessarily complex/convoluted, or because there’s more thought in it (e.g. complex mathematic operations, or edge-cases etc.). Comments just often don’t age well IME, and when people are “forced” to read the (hopefully readable) code, they will more likely understand what is really happening, and the relevant design decisions.

Good video I really recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf7vDBBOBUA

Indeed, and the maintainer opened this RFC (I think because of it)