Idea: light weight rust as zero build scripting language with JIT runtime

Though perhaps possible, creating a performant Rust interpreter like rust-repl would likely take years of effort, and I doubt that enough volunteers are available and willing to make that happen.

And I specify “volunteers” because most people who contribute to Rust do so for free AFAIK, and if none of those people are interested in a particular feature, it can easily languish for years without progress. There’d probably have to be a lot more demand or commercial support in order for people to spend years making an performant interpreter, when there’s so many other goals for the Rust project in higher demand.

Note that we do already have a Rust interpreter called Miri. However, it runs code around 100-1000x slower than the compiled program, because the primary intent of Miri is to be used for testing code, not running full-fledged programs. (It’s not a JIT or anything.) You wouldn’t get the fast iteration of JS/TS from using Miri; the part where the code runs would become the bottleneck.