This is a good point that doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention. I can’t speak for any of the core devs that routinely work on the C parts of the codebase, but I can say that personally, there were a number of improvements that I would have loved to make to the old py launcher, which I gave up on because I couldn’t face the manual memory management, and pointer manipulation, involved in string processing in C. If the launcher had been written in Rust[1], then I could have used Rust’s standard string type, and as a result I would have been motivated to work on those improvements.
So yes, a significant benefit of using Rust, even just for isolated parts of the Python stdlib, is that it could dramatically reduce the risk of developer burnout. Of course, we have to take care not to have the transition process burn people out as well, but I’m in favour of doing extra work to manage a short-term transition exercise in order to set up a better long term foundation.
An entirely reasonable possibility, it was self contained, and its build process is isolated from the core build. ↩︎