Future of Rune

[amirfarzamnia]

Rune is an awesome project. It’s not finished yet, but even now it’s really impressive.

We’re working on a new startup and trying to pick a language for running user-submitted code safely. We looked at Lua, Rhai, and QuickJS, but Rune really stood out. It’s async, lightweight compared to WASM and QuickJS, and just feels simple and well thought out.

Right now, we’re at the decision stage and had a few questions:

• What’s the plan for Rune’s future?
• Any rough timeline for it becoming stable or production-ready?
• Is it still under active development?

We’re genuinely interested in using Rune and would love to know where things are headed.

[udoprog]

Hi, and thanks for the kind words!

Rune is a hobby project. I spend some time working on it whenever I find it, but in terms of maturity you shouldn't expect anything. There are bound to be significant issues which means you must never feed it fully untrusted code like the compiler likely be coerced to run out of memory and crash the service.

Just to give a rough idea. There are quite a few blockers for a 1.0 release, but I don't have an exhaustive list beyond the issues marked as bug on this tracker. Hopefully few of them will change language semantics, but if there is a good reason to do so (e.g. enabling some optimization) that is still open. I'm starting to come around to the idea that gradual typing would be an important feature before I want to 1.0 which has a large effect on what can and cannot be done with the language. This is always on the back of my mind and is why I avoid certain metaprogramming features since they are incompatible with static typing.

My recommendation would be to use v8 if you are accepting untrusted code, which has been designed from the ground up to deal with sandboxing of untrusted code. There are a few wasm runtimes in Rust, but I'm personally not convinced they are mature enough to rely on.

[amirfarzamnia]

Thanks a lot for being honest and for all the work you’ve put into this project. I’ve been using Rune for the past few days, and honestly, it’s really impressive. I think it already beats some of the other options out there like Lua (mlua) and especially Rhai. I hope more people find out about this project and start contributing.

Thanks again for building something this good!

[czy-29]

If I understand correctly, are static types, generics, and trait bounds all on the roadmap?