Rusthon – A Pythonic language that compiles to Rust and C++

As I&#x27;m sure everyone, I was wondering, why... If you follow through from the top to the blog, there is authors reasoning:<p><i>Introducing Rusthon<p>Rust is a systems programming language, and too low level for quick prototyping, or simple web backends. It is nice to have all of the low level control so you can fine tune performance later, but it should be optional. Rusthon is a high level Python-like language that compiles to Rust. Rusthon started as a fork of Gython, which is a fork of PythonJS.<p>The goal of Rusthon is simple and clean syntax inspired by Python. Rusthon will allow you to code at a higher level than normal Rust code, and interoperate well with hand written Rust and the Rust libraries. You can start off writting your application in Rusthon, and drop down to hand written Rust where you need more performance.</i><p><a href="http://rusthon-lang.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rusthon-lang.blogspot.com&#x2F;</a>

Compiling to Rust is a really interesting proposition, because it means the resulting program has the same safe-without-gc properties as native Rust programs.

Does this care about memory at all? In the transpiled code I see structures getting allocated but never deallocated.<p>That will work for this trivial examples, but not for anything serious.<p>To properly translate Python to C++ you would have atleast produce a <i>shared_ptr&lt;T&gt;</i> from every <i>T</i> and even that doesn&#x27;t work with cycles. Rust translation is even more complicated.

Reminds me of Nim (formerly Nimrod): <a href="http://nim-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nim-lang.org&#x2F;</a>

Why would you use this over LLVM? e.g. pyston (LLVM Python) and then using llc -march=rustc&#x2F;c&#x2F;cpp&#x2F;whatever to convert?

Cython already compiles to C and is relatively mature.<p>In my opinion these hacks will always be specialty tools. What the world really needs is more languages that are both expressive and run pretty fast. e.g. Julia.

Some comments here suggest the possibility of making manual changes to the Rust code. After cross compiling, how does one make changes to the Rust code, then go back and make changes to the Python code, and cross compile again without losing the customized Rust code?

<a href="https://github.com/rusthon/Rusthon/blob/master/pythonjs/translator.py#L32" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rusthon&#x2F;Rusthon&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;pythonjs&#x2F;tran...</a><p>if &#x27;--cpp&#x27; [...] rust=True<p>Is that a bug?

It would be great if it can interoperate seamlessly with existed C++ library.

<p><pre><code> # naming fix :) mv Rusthon Pythrust</code></pre>