a-mir-formality VS datafrog

Racket is very used in the PLT community (programming language theory) for prototyping programming languages. Lots of cool stuff in this area.

For example, the MIR formality [0] project of the Rust programming language to formalize MIR (their intermediate language) was first prototyped in Racket [1], then rewritten in Rust. [1]'s readme give a rationale:

> For the time being, the model is implemented in PLT Redex. PLT Redex was chosen because it is ridiculously accessible and fun to use. It lets you write down type system rules and operational semantics and then execute them, using a notation that is very similar to what is commonly used in published papers. You can also write collections of unit tests and fuzz your model by generating test programs automatically.

> The hope is that PLT Redex will prove to be a sufficiently accessible tool that many Rust contributors will be able to understand, play with, and extend the model.

> One downside of PLT Redex is that it doesn't scale naturally to performing proofs. We may choose to port the model to another system at some point, or maintain multiple variants.

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/a-mir-formality

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/a-mir-formality/tree/1f40120f09...

But MIR optimizations are a bit of a mess right now. The semantics of MIR are not completely settled but that is an area of active work: https://github.com/nikomatsakis/a-mir-formality

That's happening separately, in the "mir-formality" project: https://github.com/nikomatsakis/a-mir-formality

The two projects are related, but have different objectives (mir-formality includes traits and borrow checking, while MiniRust focuses on operational semantics).

What is the difference with https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog? It’s a Datalog engine written by Frank McSherry on top of differential dataflow, that’s used here also

C++ is arguably the most complex programming language ever. There is not much to be gained by comparing against the supremum.

Take a look at the languages that rust was influenced by (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)) those aren't languages with straightforward compilation semantics.

There is a reason why rust has a datalog engine build into the compiler (https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog). Which is imho totally rad and awesome, but really hard to fully form a mental model of without a spec.

Datalog may be obscure, but its actually what the next generation of the borrow checker is going to be implemented in, you may find inspiration here: https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog

They used to but Frank McSherry (author of differential dataflow) wrote them a specialized version without all the dataflow infrastructure [1]. It's part of the rust-lang nursery [2] now but hasn't been updated in a while, so I'm not sure what happened to it.

[1] https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018...

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog