Why Rust?

[bdarcus]

I wanted to model the styling language and input data in code, and generate schemas from there, so they are tightly-coupled.

Because of that tight-coupling, I wanted a language that had a good typing system.

This is the opposite approach to CSL 1.0, where schemas were developed completely independently of code, so that updating the language is also quite difficult.

I first tried this with typescript, but ran into various problems.

• schemas didn't consistently match code
• weak or non-existent support for deserialization (so need to write custom code for this)

The two together would mean having to write and maintain a lot of custom code, which I am not willing to do.

Also, JS is just kind of a mess in general from my POV.

Rust, OTOH:

• Has mainstream appeal and uptake, and libraries written with it can be used in diverse contexts.
• I like cargo.
• I like its iterator support, which supports more functional patterns that I tend to prefer.
• Serde is just awesome, and gives me easy serialization, deserialization, and validation of the models, with support for different formats (here just JSON and YAML, but there are other options). I don't have to write and maintain any custom code to handle this. While I don't understand the details, my understanding is there are features in Rust that make this possible, that many other language simply don't have.
• very fast with single binaries
• easy to integrate in other language environments
• the borrow checker is quite a learning curve, but there's confidence that comes in making it happy; usually, if it compiles, it works
• I also wanted to see if in learning Rust, I could help figure out citeproc-rs; perhaps adapting pieces of it (sadly am not sure this is the case)