A few years ago I was a C evangelist. C++ was and more so now is a fine language with a lot of features I want. But Rust has that simplicity in a systems language that I crave that lets me do my own thing. That elegence. It's my favourite language by far. Keep it up!
Simplicity? Modula-3 was simple, fast, and safe. PreScheme was less type-checked but powerful and simple. You can learn how to use them in a day coming from an imperative or functional language. Rust looks like it gives users extra power/safety with quite a bit of a learning curve (most say weeks to months) due to extra complexity. Definitely not simple, though.
It's definitely simpler than most other systems languages in what it gives you access too. Go, D, C++, C# are all far more complicated than Rust is. I would argue Modula-3 is not as simple because it contains a garbage collector - thus making the connection between written and compiled code less simple. Don't know much about pre scheme
How is Rust simpler? In terms of cognitive complexity on the part of the user, Modula-3 is much simpler; it is easier for a programmer to learn to write new Modula-3 code and correctly read Modula-3 code than it is for Rust code.
In terms of implementation complexity, Modula-3 is also much simpler, despite the existence of a GC. A Modula-3 spec would be a great deal smaller than an equivalently detailed Rust spec. Many people have independently implemented Modula-3, whereas an independent implementation of Rust is effectively impossible, due to all of the unspecified implementation-defined behaviors. If you told me I had 1 year to implement either language from scratch, I would much rather choose Modula-3.
There are two alternative implementations of Rust in the works; one is _almost_ able to compile rustc at this point.
What are these implementations? The one I immediately found by searching (https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc) is accompanied by an explicit nongoal to correctly implement the language. It also doesn't seem particularly independent from rustc, given the similarities in implementation strategy and the fact that some parts look like rustc code converted to C++.
Mrustc is one; my understanding is that it isn't yet, because its purpose in life is to make bootstrapping/ddc stuff easier. Once that works, I thought it intended to add the stuff that's missing.
There's another that's not public.
> ddc stuff
Note: this refers to "Diverse Double Compilation", which is a mitigation tactic against Reflections-on-Trusting-Trust attacks.