A video introduction to my moldable inspector for Common Lisp: https://diode.zone/videos/watch/5ac43123-91fa-4b2b-a2d8-4ce0254fa2b8 Code: https://codeberg.org/khinsen/clog-moldable-inspector

Very nice!

Cool! Looked up miller columns, neat usecase here!

It's amazing to see the concepts of Glamorous Toolkit being carried over to a different programming language. I guess this might start a trend, and soon every language will have a moldable environment, and printing text to a VT100 terminal will be a thing of the past. The next obvious languages are Python and JS, but even a statically typed language like Rust could be run in an interpreter or JIT-compiled into a live environment for moldability purposes, while still allowing to make release builds as optimized machine code that runs without a runtime. There's just one thing that needs to be different. It needs a prettier font. 😉

The key feature that a language must provide for something like a moldable inspector is introspection. Compilers that strip away all the metadata required for exploration look like an obstacle. So yes, Python and JS are good candidates, but I hesitate about Rust (which I don't know much about). As for the font... Making the CSS configurable (loaded from a file) is on my to-do list. That provides as much theming support as is possible in HTML, which is a lot.

The Rust compiler itself it pretty moldable. It can be used as a library to extract any information out of the intermediate representations, so you don't work on the more or less stripped output, but directly on the compiler internals. It also has an experimental compiler backend for Cranelift, which is an alternative to LLVM and is intended to make debug builds faster. Cranelift is also ideal for making JIT compilers. So I have no doubt that Rust is a good language for moldable development, but it's going to take a series of experiments and blog posts by some very smart people, whereas in Python or JS, someone could make a moldable environment by stringing together things that are already commonplace without being a genius.

That sounds promising! I hope some Rust expert will take up this idea.