Crosscut

My primary language for the last 10+ years has been Rust, which has zero-cost abstractions (I prefer the term "zero-overhead"). An abstraction is zero-cost (or zero-overhead), if you couldn't implement it any faster "by hand", and if it doesn't impose a performance cost on code that doesn't use it.

While I rarely, if ever, use Rust to its full potential in terms of performance, I very much appreciate that concept. It ensures that the language can be used in many different environments. Heavier abstractions, like garbage collection, can rule out many microcontroller or WebAssembly use cases, for example.

It is unlikely that Caterpillar will support as diverse a set of use cases as Rust does. But I don't want to make design decisions that rule out whole classes of those outright. And for that reason, I absolutely want to implement the concept of zero-overhead abstractions in Caterpillar.