XUL is a DSL, rust is not. And to be fair, so many bad DSL has been done in the past, espacially behind corporate walls, that I understand the avortion for the

XUL is a DSL, rust is not. And to be fair, so many bad DSL has been done in the past, espacially behind corporate walls, that I understand the avortion for them. And anyone who had to work on a Lisp or Ruby code created by a DSL inspired hacker know the pain. DSL have many problems, but the most obvious one is that you get a language without the testing, documentation, tooling and community of a battle tested general one. And because by nature it targets a niche, the miracle needed for it to get real traction requires even bigger divine interventions. Even if nix was amazing (I couldn't tell, I haven't tried it), and the resulting product, not only fantastic, but worth people switching to it (which is not the same and harder to achieve, or even to recognize with honesty), the scale it would need to become practical may not even fit in the niche it targets.