AI-built Rue language pairs Rust memory safety with ease of use

A former longtime contributor to the development of Rust now is building a Rust-based language of his own, called Rue, which is intended to provide memory safety without garbage collection while being easier to use than Rust and Zig. Claude AI technology is being leveraged for developing Rue.

Written entirely in Rust, the language is in its early stage of development, with initial support for the standard library having just landed, said developer Steve Klabnik, in an emailed response to questions from InfoWorld on January 7, 2025. But development is progressing quickly, Klabnik said. “My hope is that it will fit into a sweet spot that’s somewhere higher-level than Rust, but lower-level than Go,” Klabnik said. “Not as hard to use as Rust, but also has good performance, fast compile times, and is easier to learn.” Thus, the language probably will not be good for a lot of low-level projects that Rust is great at, but will make different tradeoffs and help with different kinds of projects, he added.

Anthropic’s Claude AI technology is being leveraged in the development of Rue, with Claude helping Klabnik get work done faster. “I’m much, much farther along than if I hand-wrote the code myself. I do read all of the code before it gets merged in, but Claude does all of the authoring,” he said.  

As for the syntax, Rue aims for a gentle learning curve without sacrificing clarity. It compiles to x86-64 and Arm64 machine code. There is no garbage collector and no VM. The name, Rue, came about as a result of Klabnik having worked on development of both Rust and the Ruby on Rails framework. “A ‘rue’ can mean something like ‘to rue the day,’  but it’s also a family of flowers,” Klabnik said. “I like that there’s multiple ways of thinking about the name. It’s also short and easy to type.”