Durst: Creating a new language in Rust

I've started a new major project, with high and lofty goals that will probably never be achieved. I am creating my own programming language, with the goal to be similar to Rust in many aspects, but ensuring greater safety using dependent types.

So far, I've built a basic compiler executable that calls into a parsing library that I wrote. The executable is fairly simple, but the parsing library was interesting, as Rust gave me goals and restrictions that weren't present in other parsing libraries I've written.

First, I wanted everything to be allocated on the stack - this allows for a compact representation and allows the compiler to perform more optimizations. This was actually pretty easy, as Rust has very simple and easy to use structs and doesn't box anything without explicit requests.

Second, I wanted the parsing framework to support recursion. This was where I started to run into problems, because Rust requires all memory to be initialized. As such, it is impossible to easily create cyclic data structures. Worse, even if I were to use something like RefCell to get around these restrictions, cycles just don't fit well into Rust's ownership model - it is hard to ask who owns whom and to prove that backreferences will only live as long as the forward references.

To get around this problem, I simply required users of recursion to actually create their own implementation of the Parser trait, meaning that they can just create the cyclic parsers on the fly.

By next week, I hope to have a full AST defined and parsing, so that I can move on to interpretation.