datafrog VS minirust

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

People are working on the formal specification of rust. It isn't easy. There are at least three projects, maybe more if we include academia https://github.com/RalfJung/minirust has a summary of efforts in the end of the readme.

The real qualitative difference between the two is that C++ is developed as normative document shared by several software project. Rust, on the other hand, is developed as a software project, and its various efforts at codification, on the other hand, are targeted to make sure the pillars of the language is comprehensible and sound. Not at implementing a compiler front end in prose.

Rust doesn’t handhold you for anything low-level. It’s just that Rust hides all that complexity beneath Unsafe Rust, which is an eldritch abomination of a language that no one quite knows all the rules yet… I hope the MiniRust project (https://github.com/RalfJung/minirust) succeeds in writing a formal spec of it someday.

By the way, are you familiar with the MiniRust project?

I compare MiniRust and Ferrocene at https://github.com/RalfJung/minirust#what-about-the-ferrocen.... :) TL;DR they re quite different in style, precision, and scope.

Yeah, I didn't even bother specifying a concrete syntax. This file specifies the "abstract syntax", i.e. the result produced by the parser; it doesn't really matter much how you choose to construct those datatypes.

If you want a sneak peak and give some early feedback: https://github.com/RalfJung/minirust. The best channel for feedback is Zulip.