(Disclaimer: I'm the co-author of Mezzo, and I also happen to be a long-time Mozilla contributor).
While we indeed do not mention Rust in the bibliography, the question does pretty much come up all the time (rightly so). The answer I usually give is that Rust and Mezzo are in essence trying to achieve the same thing, except that Mezzo is in the context of ML.
Being a high-level language gives us more flexibility:
- we can afford _not_ to think about what's stack-allocated or heap-allocated;
- our adoption/abandon mechanism, which somehow keeps the complexity of the system within reasonable bounds, is implemented using run-time tests;
- de-allocation is not predictable because we use a GC (so no destructors).
So I would say that we don't have to deal with all the high-performance constraints that Rust is tackling, which makes our life easier :-).
Also, the implementation and the design is a two-man project. I think the Rust team is a tiny bit bigger now!
While we indeed do not mention Rust in the bibliography, the question does pretty much come up all the time (rightly so). The answer I usually give is that Rust and Mezzo are in essence trying to achieve the same thing, except that Mezzo is in the context of ML.
Being a high-level language gives us more flexibility:
- we can afford _not_ to think about what's stack-allocated or heap-allocated;
- our adoption/abandon mechanism, which somehow keeps the complexity of the system within reasonable bounds, is implemented using run-time tests;
- de-allocation is not predictable because we use a GC (so no destructors).
So I would say that we don't have to deal with all the high-performance constraints that Rust is tackling, which makes our life easier :-).
Also, the implementation and the design is a two-man project. I think the Rust team is a tiny bit bigger now!