(Disclaimer: I'm the co-author of Mezzo, and I also happen to be a long-time Mozilla contributor).

While we indeed do not mention Rust in the bibliography, the question does pretty much come up all the time (rightly so). The answer I usually give is that Rust and Mezzo are in essence trying to achieve the same thing, except that Mezzo is in the context of ML.

Being a high-level language gives us more flexibility:

- we can afford _not_ to think about what's stack-allocated or heap-allocated;

- our adoption/abandon mechanism, which somehow keeps the complexity of the system within reasonable bounds, is implemented using run-time tests;

- de-allocation is not predictable because we use a GC (so no destructors).

So I would say that we don't have to deal with all the high-performance constraints that Rust is tackling, which makes our life easier :-).

Also, the implementation and the design is a two-man project. I think the Rust team is a tiny bit bigger now!

> nothing has been published on Rust yet

That's a bit scary, right. A lot of stuff has been published on Rust, just not in a 10pt LaTeX font. Is there a rule in universities that things don't exist until they appear in a journal?

No, not at all. I cite non-academic sources (light table, Bret Victor) all the time in my research, however keep in mind: you are writing for your readers, and you understand their mindset. Writing for an ICFP crowd would be a bit different than writing for a hackernews crowd, so you would compare against more academic work (especially since the program committee are academics) and not so much industry projects.

A 12 page paper can never really be "complete," so optimize for the intended readership.

Well, "published" here is used in the academic sense, so yes.

It's not about some random blog posts or presentations, if that's what you mean.

To some extent, there is such a rule. But not all academics are perpetually 2-5 years behind the times by only getting updates from journals. Bleeding-edge researchers go to conferences, which can cut the latency down to as little as 6-12 months.

PL doesn't have much in the form of journals; we,rely mostly on conferences for communication, though I think that's changing a bit.

"published" != "on the web somewhere".