Thirteen years of Rust and the birth of Rue
I started using Rust on December 21, 2012. It’s now December 22, 2025. That’s a long time.
I don’t have a ton of thoughts about Rust to share today, like I thought I might. I program in the language regularly, it’s nice, I prefer it to all others. I have my beefs and my regrets, like any real project, but for the most part, I am pretty happy these days. To be honest, after a pretty rough last few years, that’s been the theme of 2025: I’m pretty happy these days.
I have long been wondering if I should try and make my own language. I really like them! That’s part of why I got invovled in Ruby and then Rust in the first place! But I’ll be turning 40 in a month, and I barely have time for things anymore. So I had kind of put that on the back burner.
But one thing that 2025 changed: I went from an AI skeptic to writing most of my code with Claude. I’m still a bit unsure about LLMs outside of programming, but as a software development tool, I’ve found them finally to be good enough to be legitimately useful. Your mileage may vary, I’m not really going to try and tell you that they should be for you, only that they are for me.
And so, earlier this year, I embarked on starting my own little language project. I decided to call it “Rue”, becuase:
- It has to start with Ru, duh. I did Ruby and then Rust, so my hands are basically tied here…
- It has a negative connotation, “to rue the day”, like Rust has a possible negative interpretation.
- It has a nature connotation, a Rue, like Rust has a possible fungi connotation.
- It’s short.
I have also been wondering for a few years if you can build a language without financial backing and a team. I think LLMs might change that equation. Yes, Claude costs money, but I mean like, you don’t need to do what Mozilla did and drop seven or eight figures worth of money on a development team to make meaningful progress. And since I don’t have a ton of personal time these days, what better way to test that than to actually give it a go.
Anyway, I got into it, and kind of made a mess of the first go. And then I had a tremendously busy fall, and had to put things by the wayside.
But this week, I had some time after work, and decided to start over. And I’m much more happy with how it’s going this time. So I’ve decided it’s time to at least let the world know I’m working on it, just because why not.
I don’t expect it to grow to anything more than my hobby project, but then again, that’s also true of Ramsus and Graydon and a ton of other language authors, so, never say never. But that’s not an explicit goal here. I reserve the right to just stop working on this when I think it’s not fun. I’m not trying to build a community or even add committers. It’s just something for me for fun.
You can find Rue over at https://rue-lang.dev/ if you want to check it out. There’s a blog with an RSS feed. I may blog there, I may not. But I’ll probably keep it over there more than over here, in general.
I’m not saying that Claude is amazing, or that this code is fantastic, or anything. The language is still very janky. I’m sure I have codgen bugs. It’s missing basic features. It is very, very much a work in progress.
Thank you to everyone for making 2025 a nice year. There’s a lot of terrible things in this world right now, but I’m more hopeful than ever, personally. I hope to still be writing Rust in another ten years, and maybe even writing some Rue. We’ll see :)
Here’s my post about this post on BlueSky:
Thirteen years of #rustlang and the birth of #ruelang steveklabnik.com/writing/thir...