elaboration-zoo VS rfcs

I've noticed amongst many peers that when going down the type theory/pl theory journey there is a ton of hidden knowledge and context we all find ourselves collecting.

All of this knowledge and context spread amongst a common set of books, papers, blog posts, and git repos floating around the internet.

At the risk of creating yet another partial silo, I decided earlier this year to create a project similar to the [Elaboration Zoo](https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/elaboration-zoo) but focused on a blessed path to MLTT with a number of the desirable language features via bidirectional typechecking.

https://github.com/solomon-b/lambda-calculus-hs

The project is incomplete and my end goal is a website like the [1 Lab](https://1lab.dev) but focused on Type Theory and PL Theory, but I ran low on steam and could use some collaborators.

Thanks, yeah, I haven't benchmarked the implementation yet, and I see the repeated substitution happening. Would the NbE approach where we have indices for terms and levels for values fix the issue (I believe you wrote the implementation here)?

I find the NbE approach that combines both indices and levels quite appealing. You remain first-order (easier for debugging and etc.), but no need to define substitution now.

If you're interested in dependent types, you might like András Kovács' elaboration zoo, which uses Haskell as the implementation language.

I think it's more a reflection of how Rust evolved, and the techniques and approaches known and understood at the time and the strangeness budget they were (understandably) willing to take on at the time as opposed to something inherent. And also sometimes having separate, complicated features for similar things (as opposed to simple features that compose powerfully) can be useful pedagogically as well.

At any rate, this is something I'm interested in, and so that's why it appears so high up on my list. Often you really do want sub-languages for different purposes, but managing how they interact and work together, what is the same and what is different, and how that impacts usability is interesting (and difficult) part. I feel like it should be possible to do this, but it's going to take some work and there's still lots of unknowns.

In technical terms, I'm interested in dependently typed module systems, multistage programming[1], graded modal type theory[2], elaborator reflection, and two level type theory[3]. These all sound pretty intimidating, but you can actually see glimmers of some of this stuff in how Zig handles type parameters and modules, for example, something that most programmers really like the first time they see it!

I do feel like there is the core of a simple, flexible, powerful systems language out there... but finding it, and making it approachable while maintaining a solid footing in the theory and being sensitive to the practical demands of systems programming is a nontrivial task, and many people will be understandably skeptical that this is even a good direction to pursue. Thankfully the barrier to entry for programming language designers to implementing languages in this style has reduced significantly in just the last number of years[4], so I have hope that we might see some interesting stuff in the coming decade or so. In the meantime we have Rust as well, which is still an excellent language. I'm just one of those people who's never content with the status quo, always wishing we can push the state of the art further. This is why I got excited by Rust in the first place! :)

[1]: https://github.com/metaocaml/metaocaml-bibliography

[2]: https://granule-project.github.io/

[3]: https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/staged

[4]: https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/elaboration-zoo/

Another option is this algorithm by Andras Kovacs dubbed "Dynamic order elaboration": https://github.com/AndrasKovacs/elaboration-zoo/tree/master/06-first-class-poly . Basically if you are checking a term against a bare meta variable, then postpone the checking until the meta variable has a solution.

Special shout out to /u/AndrasKovacs and elaboration-zoo (as well as their various NbE notes) which served as a primary inspiration for the architecture. Can't thank you enough for those resources!

Highly recommend checking the first part of elaboration-zoo to see how all this might be implemented, it clears a lot of things up.

Pattern unification

RFC: Add large language models to Rust

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3603

Man, SO and family has really gone downhill. That top answer is absolutely terrible. In fact, if you care, you can literally look at the RFC discussion here to see the actual debate: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/582

Basically, `for x in y` is kind of redundant, already sorta-kinda supported by itertools, and there's also a ton of macros that sorta-kinda do it already. It would just be language bloat at this point.

Literally has nothing to do with memory management.

Congrats!

> Similarly, uv does not yet generate a platform-agnostic lockfile. This matches pip-tools, but differs from Poetry and PDM, making uv a better fit for projects built around the pip and pip-tools workflows.

Do you expect to make the higher level workflow independent of requirements.txt / support a platform-agnostic lockfile? Being attached to Rye makes me think "no".

Without being platform agnostic, to me this is dead-on-arrival and unable to meet the "Cargo for Python" aim.

> uv supports alternate resolution strategies. By default, uv follows the standard Python dependency resolution strategy of preferring the latest compatible version of each package. But by passing --resolution=lowest, library authors can test their packages against the lowest-compatible version of their dependencies. (This is similar to Go's Minimal version selection.)

> uv allows for resolutions against arbitrary target Python versions. While pip and pip-tools always resolve against the currently-installed Python version (generating, e.g., a Python 3.12-compatible resolution when running under Python 3.12), uv accepts a --python-version parameter, enabling you to generate, e.g., Python 3.7-compatible resolutions even when running under newer versions.

This is great to see though!

I can understand it being a flag on these lower level, directly invoked dependency resolution operations.

While you aren't onto the higher level operations yet, I think it'd be useful to see if there is any cross-ecosystem learning we can do for my MSRV RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3537

How are you handling pre-releases in you resolution? Unsure how much of that is specified in PEPs. Its something that Cargo is weak in today but we're slowly improving.

In the early days of Rust there was a debate about whether to support "green threads" and in doing that require runtime support. It was actually implemented and included for a time but it creates problems when trying to do library or embedded code. At the time Go for example chose to go that route, and it was both nice (goroutines are nice to write and well supported) and expensive (effectively requires GC etc). I don't remember the details but there is a Rust RFC from when they removed green threads:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/0806be4f282144cfcd55b...

I did some more digging. By RFC 899, I believe Alex Crichton meant PR 899 in this repo:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/899

Still, no real discussion of why unbuffered stderr.

Rust has had a stable SIMD vector API[1] for a long time. But, it's architecture specific. The portable API[2] isn't stable yet, but you probably can't use the portable API for some of the more exotic uses of SIMD anyway. Indeed, that's true in .NET's case too[3].

Rust does all this SIMD too. It just isn't in the standard library. But the regex crate does it. Indeed, this is where .NET got its SIMD approach for multiple substring search from in the first place[4]. ;-)

You're right that Rust's standard library is conservatively vectorized though[5]. The main thing blocking this isn't the lack of SIMD availability. It's more about how the standard library is internally structured, and the fact that things like substring search are not actually defined in `std` directly, but rather, in `core`. There are plans to fix this[6].

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/arch/index.html

[2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html

[3]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/72fae0073b35a404f03c3...

[4]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/88394#issuecomment-16...

[5]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/memchr#why-is-the-standard-lib...

[6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3469