My heritage is Italian and I happened to be eating cannoli when I started writing the parser around December, figured it'd be a fun name :)

Well, it is a fun name.

Do you plan to support this down the line? I feel like compilers that compile down to Rust could become really good tools depending on how the popularity of the language goes.

I would certainly like to. The base implementation of Cannoli is the best place to continue this. Some optimizations that were implemented apply restrictions to parts of the language and following these any further would ultimately diverge from the Python project. That being said, many of the optimizations could still be done and "fall back" on unoptimized code at run time if needed. I think this project certainly shows a lot of promise, it just hasn't been developed as long as other projects so it still needs plenty of work :).

Having been around the Rust community for a few years, I'm a bit tired of -rs and rust names.

I feel like the postfix is something languages lose the bigger they get, I hope this happens to rust too.

I think I read this as "Pike Rust" about 5 times before I got the joke. I guess it's time for that 2PM coffee.

Took me a minute too. "pie crust".

Fortunately, that means the "pie crust" name is still available for a Pike[1]†-Rust project :-)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language) †: I have a particular fondness for Pike, because it's derived from the first programming language I ever used: LPC. Anyone else an LPC hacker?