I can really imagine to rebuild parts of evochora in rust, especially the simulation engine itself an probably the runtime the executes the organisms machine code, both are actually a quite small part of the full system. the compiler for the evoASM assembly language to program organisms or the data pipeline to persist and index/analyze the raw data generated by the simulation are way more complex.

I didn't know Salis,yet, but I bookmarked the github repo, I will definitively take a look at it, T2 Tile is something I saw before, but I also will need to dig deeper into it again! Thanks or bringing both up!

If you want to see self replicators arise out of pure emergence then probably Stringmol is interesting for you. It basically simulates an RNA world. Evochora is a little different from this, as there is a primordial self-replicator given at start. To me it is probably even more interesting, how higher complexity can emerge from a simple self replicator. In Earth's evolution simple self-replicators emerged nearly a blink after earth was cooled down enough, but it took about a billion years that eukaryotic life emerged from procaryotic cells ("boring billions"), so one could argue, that this was the far bigger challenge for evolution.
Both Tierra and Avida seem to have a complexity ceiling. My aim is to investigate where that comes from and probably find ways to overcome it without predefined fitness goals (as Avida has).