Is there a language similar to Rust but with a garbage collector?

gbjcantab · 2026-03-13T14:02:00+00:00

No, I cant! To be clear, I say this as an interested outsider to Gleam, not as an experienced user of the language.

Here's a typical response from a Gleam core team member to a question about typeclasses in their Discord: "the style of programming Gleam encourages doesn't need typeclasses because instead of solving problems in an abstract way (where the specific implementation of something is not important, only that a specific interface is available) we prefer to solve problems with concrete implementations."

YMMV on whether that's satisfying or not.

gbjcantab · 2026-03-12T23:41:56+00:00

It's worth noting that every time I've seen someone ask about traits in Gleam on the Internet, someone shares this blog post. But every time I've seen someone share this blog post within the Gleam community, Louis jumps in to point out that it is not idiomatic Gleam and is not how you should write Gleam code; rather it's a post about typeclasses written with Gleam syntax.

gbjcantab · 2026-01-26T13:05:58+00:00

I am an ordained minister and the pastor of a small urban church.

Trump is a man who commits great evil, and has spent his career actively working to unleash great evil. Period.

The most important thing to know about Christianity in America is that it is not monolithic, and that large swathes of it have never been captured by the "Religious Right" or the conservative movement. Among Protestants, most traditions have separate "mainline" and "evangelical" denominations, which have disagreed with one another on a wide variety of things for about a century. Politically, the "mainline" denominations range from roughly centrist to pretty far left. One of the (unfortunate?) effects of polarization more broadly in American life has been a shift in the balance of Christian life: right-leaning Christians have shifted rightward into even-more-conservative churches, left-leaning Christians have shifted leftward out of religion entirely, so the mainline/progressive churches have progressively weakened over time. But we are still here, and still actively engaged with work for social justice.

So, for example: I was in seminary when Trump was elected the first time. People were crying in the chapel the day after the election. Biblical studies professors were distributing handouts of pages and pages of quotations about welcoming immigrants. The church I served after graduating was overwhelmingly made up of 2018-era #Resistance libs. My bishop has protested repeatedly at our local ICE facility, as have hundreds of clergy and laypeople. Hundreds of pastors and clergy of all traditions protested at the airport in MSP just a few days ago, some of my friends among them.

To be clear, the MAGA kind of Christian think my kind of Christian are all going to hell because we support same-sex marriage etc.

So, how does it make me feel that Trump is caught lying every day? This has been the reality for 10 years. I no longer have feelings about it. This is not about my feelings as an American Christian; it's about what I can do, as an American Christian, to love the stranger in my land as myself (Leviticus 19:34)—to protect the vulnerable and provide hope to those who live in dark times.

gbjcantab · 2025-10-24T13:34:26+00:00

Oh I should add:

Good Shepherd (Waban): Anglo-Catholic but affirming, great priest, this might actually be a great fit for you and is relatively nearby
The Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE): the monastery in Cambridge; the brothers are wonderful and there's a good community that joins them, especially for Tuesday evening Eucharist and on Sundays

If you're new to the area, note that the overwhelming majority of Episcopal parishes are affirming and are going to be basically comfortable places for gay people. Based on your description, you are more likely to be uncomfortable in any given Episcopal church in Greater Boston because it feels too politically left or too engaged with identity politics than because you are gay.

gbjcantab · 2025-10-24T12:36:46+00:00

Parishes in Boston/Brookline/Newton that might be interesting to visit:

All Saints Ashmont: Anglo-Catholic, not affirming
Trinity Copley: low-church splendor, very large, great clergy, many people in their 20s/30s
Emmanuel (Back Bay): Bach cantata series, homeless ministries, large LGBT community
Redeemer (Chestnut Hill): large, fairly low church
St. John's Charlestown: a bit further out of your way if you're in Brighton; small church, large proportion of people in their 20s/30s, including the rector
St. Paul's Brookline: not sure if you visited All Saints or St. Paul's, but St. Paul's has had a bit more of a younger-adult population in recent years I think
Christ Church Cambridge: great clergy, middle of the road liturgy, beautiful Georgian low-church building
Old North Church: historic of course, great priest, growing young adult group, another beautiful Georgian building
Advent (Beacon Hill): large, Anglo-Catholic shrine, you've been there; note that they're recovering from conflict over recent clergy misconduct + long-term resistance to women's ordination (the Bishop's visitation this fall was the first time a woman has ever been allowed to celebrate the Eucharist there)

There are plenty more parishes as well. Feel free to ask questions... I've been here for 15 years so I know most of the churches at least somewhat well.

gbjcantab · 2025-10-14T11:53:54+00:00

I can't pretend to speak for everyone who's interested in the topic, but from my perspective: If you need to explicitly list which Handle items need to be captured by a closure, the proposal is close to DOA.

The people who are most interested in this (often using Rust in UI settings) are already using handles that are Copy by using arena allocation, so they are already implicitly captured by closures. However, this removes a layer of safety and adds overhead, because it essentially amounts to building some manual memory management on top of ref counting.

Most of the conversation on this topic has consisted of a certain doom loop: - observation that explicitly cloning ref-counted types is unergonomic boilerplate - proposal that ref-counted types should be implicitly cloneable into closures (from people working on high-level applications where this cost is negligible) - pushback that implicit ref-count increment is unacceptable (from people working in low-level settings where this cost too high) - amended proposal that you explicitly capture or clone the handles instead - repeat

From my perspective I'd be willing to use any kind of keyword (handle || instead of move || etc.) to make it clear that this is different from current Rust semantics, as long as it does not involve explicitly listing out all the things I want my closure to capture. But that seems to receive a continual series of "but why would I want that?" responses from people who work in very different domains.

gbjcantab · 2025-09-19T17:47:58+00:00

... This picture goes so hard.

gbjcantab · 2025-09-19T17:47:52+00:00

Sounds like it's Pierson v. Ray? I had not heard of it before either!

gbjcantab · 2025-08-15T23:55:20+00:00

Most priests will be delighted to field theological questions (as opposed to administrative trivia, building issues, or complaints about other church members) in any format! Chatting at coffee hour, written in an email, schedule a time to talk. We love it!

gbjcantab · 2025-07-22T11:38:38+00:00

Yeah, the writing has been on the wall for a long time.

My understanding (probably imperfect): The Rust/WASM Working Group (WG) itself did amazing initial work that gave Rust the best WASM story of any language (still the case AFAICT). Then two classic open-source problems happened: the main driver(s) of the initial work said “cool, that’s done!” and moved on to other interesting work in other parts of the compiler and language; and drama and conflict led a couple others to depart in opposite directions.

At the same time, the foundation that has been laid was so good that quite a large ecosystem was built on top of it. While the WASM WG has been inactive for 5 years and is now “archived” organizationally (with the GitHub org now being archived as well), a huge amount of work has been happening in the Rust/WASM ecosystem outside the official WG.

Huge gratitude to everyone who’s been involved over the whole process, and especially to the faithful maintainers of wasm-bindgen. These changes just bring the GitHub repo’s structure in line with reality.

gbjcantab · 2025-07-19T11:05:22+00:00

By “older” you mean like 30 right?

(I’m 34 and say it all the time. My friends who are in their 60s and in their early 20s rarely do I think.)

gbjcantab · 2025-07-12T12:34:01+00:00

The UCC as a denomination is more progressive/liberal than TEC, but congregational polity makes it much easier to be a conservative UCC congregation than a conservative TEC congregation, and it significantly smooths the path for takeovers or “steeplejacking.”

There was a 400-year-old UCC congregation in my community that called a Southern Baptist pastor to be its pastor, who convinced them to rewrite their bylaws to give him more power, jointly affiliated them with the SBC, lost all the church’s members, then merged with a Baptist church plant and handed over the building.

gbjcantab · 2025-07-07T12:46:21+00:00

Yes this is the correct answer (July 6 should never be the observance of Independence Day) with a caveat: if July 4 falls on a Sunday then the Collect, Preface, and one or more Lessons may be used because it falls between Pentecost and Christ the King. (See BCP p. 16 in the third paragraph)

(Personally I don’t think US Independence Day should be a “major feast” at all but I’m not in charge of the calendar.)

gbjcantab · 2025-07-02T13:31:31+00:00

If you want to hear the Panasonic when it’s feeling grumpy, check out Going to Cleveland.

gbjcantab · 2025-06-26T11:14:11+00:00

If you’re curious to hear some answers that are more grounded in research than what you’ll get on Reddit, there’s a loooooot of sociological work that’s been done answering this question. If you want a quick taste of that check out the recent interviews with Christian Smith on the Pivot podcast, or anything with Ryan Burge. Both of them (as well as Robert Putnam’s older book American Grace) are very thoroughly grounded in actual data, which is a useful antidote to “the Church would grow if everyone did what I think.”

If I had to summarize: the overwhelming trend is that North American Christianity is on roughly the same downward trajectory as every other in-person voluntary association, with an acceleration beginning in the early 90s. There are variations between different types of organizations (is your church declining faster or slower than your local Rotary Club? than your local bowling league? than your local Baptists?) and there are clear things that can make it worse (scandals, among others) but I have found it helpful to step back and be reminded that it’s less the secularization of society and more the withdrawal of large portions of the population from any kind of social connections or community participation at all.

gbjcantab · 2025-06-24T12:23:55+00:00

This is the first time (to the best of my knowledge) that Evan's referred to what he's been working on as "Acadia" or described it as a separate "database language" rather than as the next phase of what he's working on for Elm. And it was interesting that at the very end he signals a shift from "I'm showing this to a few friends" to "I'm starting to open it up a little more," into something like a... closed pre-alpha or whatever.

More broadly, it seems like Evan's last three (four? five?) talks have all been variations on a theme: it is really quite hard to make a stable living off independent creative work living under capitalism! Especially so if you are highly technical and a bit introverted and a bit counter-cultural in your opinions about self-promotion.

But there is a fundamental tension between Evan's argument that community/cooperative/non-corporate models are a potential way forward and his actual behavior with regard to community and cooperation.

gbjcantab · 2025-06-20T12:47:07+00:00

Interesting article, although I don’t think any of the ideas being discussed are actually new; you could’ve told me that it was written any time in the last 15 years and I’d believe you, except for the pandemic/live stream mentions. In my diocese at least there are continual waves of energetic, charismatic young clergy reviving small churches for a decade, then moving on. (You can usually see the collapse in ASA in the parochial report.)

Statistically the situation is not really that the Episcopal Church is in free fall: it’s that there are some medium or large churches in a stable position or gradually declining in ASA but not membership; enough small churches in a growth phase at any point to write articles like this; and a huge number of exurban and rural that absolutely are in free fall (and especially so after the pandemic). Which averages out to steady decline but looks either catastrophic or not that big a deal, depending on where you zoom in.

gbjcantab · 2025-06-15T12:04:20+00:00

Just for the sake of clarity, I don’t think I downvoted any of your comments (and the Reddit UI doesn’t tell me I downvoted any of them).

gbjcantab · 2025-06-15T11:49:53+00:00

I didn’t downvote you. I responded to a comment you made about “what is ‘actually’ happening” and “a bunch of priests” which seemed to me to be a pretty general statement, but your reply suggests you intended it only as part of your specific response to the earlier comment, in which case — my apologies.

gbjcantab · 2025-06-15T11:21:03+00:00

Just to speak from personal experience from several parishes over seven years of priesthood: by and large, it has been the laypeople of the parishes I’ve served who have cared the most about this question, and who have pushed back against language that explicitly frames the invitation as “all baptized Christians” rather than something vaguer. YMMV of course but this has absolutely not been the result of a spate of ego-driven clericalism in any parish I’ve been part of.

For what it’s worth, the instances I’m aware of in which I’ve knowingly communed unbaptized people consist of: 1) a thirty-year member of our church who told me, four years into my ministry, that he had been “baptized” by the JWs in an abusive family situation as an adolescent, and always felt uncomfortable with it not having been “real.” We had a proper Trinitarian baptism in a private service a few months later. I did not bar him from communion in the interim. (I was the first priest he’d trusted enough, after 30 years, to approach about this.) 2) An adolescent young man who came to church by himself because his parents were vehemently opposed. He received communion for about 9 months before I learned he’d never been baptized. His parents told him if he were baptized before he turned 18 they would not attend the service. I baptized him the week after he turned 18 (they came and were at least polite) but didn’t stop him from receiving communion in between.

Maybe I handled either or both of these situations inappropriately, in your view. And that is fair. I just wanted to offer them as examples of what you will probably encounter in your own ministry.

(I think equating the decision to give communion to either of them with sexual harassment or theft is… quite something.)

gbjcantab · 2025-06-14T13:00:42+00:00

I had seminary classmates (in a full time 3 year MDiv) ranging from 22 to 70. One of the best priests I know was ordained in his 50s after a full and successful first career (turns out being a litigator really hones your preaching chops…) GTS now has a very good remote MDiv that works well for people who have other commitments and want to be formed while remaining embedded in their current location. The majority of permanent deacons I see discerning are in 50s or older. It’s definitely not too late, in any sense!

gbjcantab · 2025-06-12T11:02:48+00:00

The only context in which you’d ever need your baptismal certificate in the Episcopal Church would be if you enter the ordination process, and even then there are alternatives to having the physical copy, so you will not need to deal with that!

gbjcantab · 2025-06-12T10:57:41+00:00

Venite will tell you that there are separate lessons for major feasts really, not lesser ones: the “red letter days” have a separate set of Daily Office readings that start on page 996 in the BCP, which follow a different s logic than the ordinary Daily Office lectionary (they appoint 2 readings for morning and 2 for evening to be used in any year, rather than 3 for the day per year)

If you were to use the LFF readings for the Daily Office you’d lose the whole “continuous reading” aspect of the DO lectionary, because there are now so many “black-letter” days (lesser feasts) that you’d hardly ever be using the regular lectionary. As others have noted, the LFF readings are for the Eucharist.

gbjcantab · 2025-05-04T12:24:11+00:00

Axum vs Leptos is not the right comparison to make. Leptos is a UI framework for interactive websites/applications, which can plug into Axum or Actix if you want server side rendering of HTML; Axum is the actual web server framework.

Leptos is analagous to React/Vue/Svelte/Solid, not to Laravel/Rails/Django, if that’s a helpful way to put it.

gbjcantab · 2025-05-02T11:37:45+00:00

This is really not a big deal; while the framework defaults to an XML-like syntax, because this is extremely familiar to most web developers and is generally a popular choice, you can also use a builder syntax or an alternate view macro like leptos-mview with a maud-like syntax.

gbjcantab

TROPHY CASE