"Steve Klabnik, known for authoring The Rust Programming Language and for his contributions to the Rust project over 13 years, has announced Rue, a systems programming language that explores memory safety without garbage collection while prioritizing developer ergonomics over Rust's complexity. The project, developed with substantial assistance from Anthropic's Claude AI, targets an underserved design space between high-performance systems languages and garbage-collected alternatives. Marking his thirteenth anniversary using Rust, Klabnik explained his motivation in a blog post:"
"I have long been wondering if I should try and make my own language. I really like them! That's part of why I got involved in Ruby and then Rust in the first place! The language name follows his "Ru" prefix pattern (Ruby, Rust, Rue) while maintaining dual interpretations-both a flower and an expression of regret. Klabnik's core design question: "What if Rust wasn't trying to compete with C and C++ for the highest performance possible? What if we were willing to make things a little bit, but not too much, less performant, in exchange for ease of use?""
"The technical approach centers on eliminating Rust's signature feature, the borrow checker. Consider typical Rust code where you try to modify a vector while holding a reference to one of its elements. The compiler rejects this because the reference might become invalid. Rue sidesteps the entire problem by using "inout" parameters that temporarily transfer ownership, similar to Swift. In Rust, attempting to modify a vector while iterating over it fails at compile time. Rue's inout parameters let you temporarily pass mutable references, but prevent storing them in data structures; eliminating the need for lifetime tracking while maintaining memory safety through simpler restrictions. Functions can mutate values in place, but those values can't be stored as references in heap-allocated"
Rue is a systems programming language that explores memory safety without garbage collection while prioritizing developer ergonomics over extreme performance. The design targets a gap between high-performance systems languages and garbage-collected alternatives by accepting modest performance trade-offs for simpler, more usable safety rules. Rue removes Rust's borrow checker and replaces lifetime tracking with "inout" parameters that temporarily transfer ownership, permitting in-place mutation but forbidding storing those transient references in heap-allocated data structures. The project received substantial assistance from Anthropic's Claude AI. Rue aims to maintain memory safety through simpler restrictions and clearer ergonomics.
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