- Author
- Evan Ovadia
- Published
- June 28, 2026
- Kind
- Personal blog post on a language design, with code examples
- Original
- verdagon.dev/blog/ante-blending-borrowing-rc
- Subject
- Programming languages and types
What it is
Evan Ovadia, who works on the Vale language, walks through Ante's rules for mutable references. The post explains shape-stability, shared types, unions and temporary uniq conversion.
What it says
- Ovadia says Ante blends reference counting and borrow checking for mutable objects without run-time panics.
- Ante's shape-stability allows several mutable borrows of one struct and its fields at once.
- Types marked shared are reference counted, and their fields can be mutably borrowed without locking.
- A mut borrow of a union cannot yield a mut borrow of its variants.
- A temporary uniq reference is allowed if the scope uses nothing that might alias it.
- Ovadia says Ante's creator stressed the check needs type analysis, which could be brittle.
- Ovadia says Rust's Cell cannot give a mutable reference to a String inside an Rc.
What evidence it gives
The post offers Ante code snippets and the compile errors the design should produce. It gives a Rust Cell comparison in an appendix. It shows no benchmarks and no tests of a running compiler.
Interests and limits
The post says Ante is a work in progress with parts still theoretical. Ovadia works on Vale, a related language, and says so in a note. The post reports no performance numbers. Ovadia, not the creator, calls the type-analysis check possibly brittle.