There are two deep capabilities that make Rust, Rust:
1. Banning shared, mutable data. You can't change data that other code might be reading. This is a huge win for threading and multiple CPUs, but it's a dramatic departure from other popular languages.
2. Knowing how data is laid out in memory. This is classic "systems programming" stuff, and it's also present in C, C++, Zed, etc. This usually goes along with making memory allocation visible (though not always in C++). This is a big win for performance.
If you wanted to build a "scripting language" version of Rust, you could probably lose (2). Languages like Haskell are even stricter than Rust, but they hide the details of memory layout. But then you need to decide whether to keep or lose (1). If you keep it, your language will have good threading, but users will need to think about ownership and borrowing. If you lose (1), then your language won't feel very much like Rust.
It would be an interesting intellectual exercise! But actually turning it into a popular scripting language would probably require the same luck and the same 10 years of work that most successful languages need to get real traction.
1. Banning shared, mutable data. You can't change data that other code might be reading. This is a huge win for threading and multiple CPUs, but it's a dramatic departure from other popular languages.
2. Knowing how data is laid out in memory. This is classic "systems programming" stuff, and it's also present in C, C++, Zed, etc. This usually goes along with making memory allocation visible (though not always in C++). This is a big win for performance.
If you wanted to build a "scripting language" version of Rust, you could probably lose (2). Languages like Haskell are even stricter than Rust, but they hide the details of memory layout. But then you need to decide whether to keep or lose (1). If you keep it, your language will have good threading, but users will need to think about ownership and borrowing. If you lose (1), then your language won't feel very much like Rust.
It would be an interesting intellectual exercise! But actually turning it into a popular scripting language would probably require the same luck and the same 10 years of work that most successful languages need to get real traction.