[_nalply]

Sometimes I dream about a Rust-like programming language with optional garbage collection similar to Swift that runs in three stages: The first one is an idempotent interpreter so heavily sandboxed that it can only read the source code and output only diagnostics and the second stage: a more static programming language. Meta-programming!

This would allow simplifying the second stage massively because it is generated code and won't need ergonomy. This programming language would parse the sprintf format string exactly as if the compiled program would do it at runtime. When I read the article I thought to myself, aha, dependent types, could it be that it is similar to a user-provided program that computes the types?

I have to disclaim that designing programming languages is not my expertise. I am only an amateur.

These two stages avoid the complexity of Rust compile-time handling. Instead of hard coding things like lifetimes, generics, const generics, return position impl trait in trait (RPITIT), async fn in trait (AFIT), and so on, have a first stage standard library handling all these things.

And the third stage? A sandboxed interpreter with the same or similar syntax as the rest of the thing. I think this would be useful as glue code or just for tiny throw-away scripts. All these three stages would profit from a common base, so they should be provided together.

Makes sense?