genemichaels VS topiary

Python and JavaScript have similarly good formatters (as long as your idiot colleagues don't insist on using yapf instead of Black, despite yapf producing non-deterministic output!). In fact I would say Rust is probably behind Prettier in terms of auto formatting. The rustfmt output is less pretty (subjective I know), the devs have made several strange decisions and it seems to be semi-abandoned (maybe partly because the devs were ... shall we say not as friendly and welcoming as the Rust community likes to bleat on about).

There are a couple of alternative formatters:

* https://github.com/andrewbaxter/genemichaels

There are alternatives to rustfmt: Prettier Rust and genemichaels

Gene Michaels, code formatter

I think we should all take inspiration from Gene Michaels and just start naming crates after random people.

You should check out https://github.com/tweag/topiary

Yes, theoretically if you had ~identical grammars you could use it to do a full transpilation. There's a lot of challenges with that though. Writing a correct grammar for 1 language is complicated enough, but writing one for two where all your nodes and fields end up the same is likely insurmountable.

In practice, languages are either:

- Far enough apart that any pure AST transformation is insufficient and you need an AI component to produce usable output

This is something we've discussed[1] in the development of Topiary, deferring the process to the formatter. It's not a priority issue for us right now, but given the lack of universal editor support for elastic tab stops, having the formatter do this seems like a reasonable solution.

[1]: https://github.com/tweag/topiary/issues/170

build on top of https://github.com/tweag/topiary/blob/main/languages/rust.scm