[ufo]

How was your experience using Rust as a target language (instead of C)? I understand that Rust has lots of features for when you want to write code by hand but do those also help when you are working with generated code? Or does the borrow checker get in the way all the time?

[joncatanio]

Great question! The "Compiling Python" section of my thesis is pretty much an explanation of how I had to translate elements of Python into Rust because of the borrow checker. There were a couple tricks (like using closures for functions) to getting around compile-time borrow checking. Some situations required the use of Rc & RefCell to provide multiple references to mutable data, this defers borrow checking to run time. So yes, the borrow checker got in the way. But I didn't have to write a garbage collector because the automatic memory management was handled via Rust's ownership rules (the caveat here is with cyclical references which would need to be tracked, this work was omitted for time).

It does complicate the generated code, I don't know if Rust is the greatest intermediate representation. But I do think it was a better choice than C. Debugging the generated code was so great because of the detail that the Rust compiler displays for warnings/errors.

I'd be interested in seeing how a Python interpreter written in Rust would compare to CPython, this would probably make use of more Rust optimizations (than trying to generate code).

[ufo]

Ah, I hadn't realized that Cannoli is also using Rust-style memory management. In that case compiling to Rust would certainly help a lot.

[emmelaich]

Not to answer your question but if you want C / C++, have a look at Shedskin

https://github.com/shedskin/shedskin