Programming: Smalltalk and Rust

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 07, 2025

• Noel Rappin ☛ Ruby And Its Neighbors: Smalltalk

  Last time, we talked about Perl as an influence on Ruby, this time, we’ll talk about the other major influence on Ruby: Smalltalk.

  Smalltalk had a different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk’s syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.

  Also unlike Perl, I spent a good couple of years working in Smalltalk, and it is one of my favorite languages that I’ll never likely use in anger again.

• Rust

  • Niko Matsakis: Bikeshedding `Handle` and other follow-up thoughts

    There have been two major sets of responses to my proposal for a Handle trait. The first is that the Handle trait seems useful but doesn’t over all the cases where one would like to be able to ergonomically clone things. The second is that the name doesn’t seem to fit with our Rust conventions for trait names, which emphasize short verbs over nouns. The TL;DR of my response is that (1) I agree, this is why I think we should work to make Clone ergonomic as well as Handle; and (2) I agree with that too, which is why I think we should find another name. At the moment I prefer Share, with Alias coming in second.

  • Niko Matsakis: But then again...maybe alias?

    Hmm, as I re-read the post I literally just posted a few minutes ago, I got to thinking. Maybe the right name is indeed Alias, and not Share. The rationale is simple: alias can serve as both a noun and a verb. It hits that sweet spot of “common enough you know what it means, but weird enough that it can be Rust Jargon for something quite specific”. In the same way that we talk about “passing a clone of foo” we can talk about “passing an alias to foo” or an “alias of foo”. Food for thought! I’m going to try Alias on for size in future posts and see how it feels.