I was sent this and read over the spec recently <https://austral-lang.org/>
It seems to be some attempt to simplify Rust down to something that "a single person can understand just by reading this spec." They basically take the copy and move semantics entry and treat everything as a move semantics--which consumes the objects like it does with moves--but then they return the object again if you're supposed to continue using it. The compiler checks that you used everything exactly once, basically writing the entire program and single assignment form. When you're done with the object you call something that just doesn't return it so that is destroyed. They gave an example of opening a file, writing to that file a couple a times, and then closing the file, and the compiler won't allow you to leave that scope without closing the file or using some other kind of function that destroys the handle. Then there's a very basic version of the borrow checker which allows you to prevent that handle from being destroyed, or making the handle immutable so you can't write to it, and then you can pass the borrows around, which have some kind of basic lifetime tracking as well. It looked like an interesting kind of system and I'm not sure how much that relates to anything Nim programmers would be interested in. I'm also not entirely sure how well this would work in practice. Their examples are very basic and I'd be curious to see how something simple like an entity component system could be written using the linear types they provide. Perhaps something that we could macrom or try to expand into Nim if it seemed like it was useful enough.
