I see what you mean, I suppose I should have clarified.

I want to dig into one of these editors for a stronger understanding of how they work, and using something as obtuse as Rust is a total nonstarter for me.

I read through the source of micro over a few weekends during the 2020 lockdowns and really enjoyed the experience, though I was woefully underprepared with spending that much time looking at Go, which I wasn't familiar with at the time. Even still, I felt relatively confident within a few hours.

Conversely, I've seen things like: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust from Rusties that just made me sick to my stomach. It's just ridiculous how many syntactical elements there are, and how little is done for the end-user by way of ergonomics. To top it off, people who've spend dozens (!!!) of hours with Rust still struggle with it. With Go, Python, maybe C, and others, I can typically bring students or grads up to speed enough to at least have a decent conversation about crucial code within a single workday.

I do think that the Rust ecosystem is a brittle one, despite the grandiose claims of safety and security, in that few people whose time is valuable and whose experience is vast would be spending their time wisely coming up to speed with the language in any scenario, even outside of text editors. The

Again, I'm not starting a Rust-bashing thread, esp not with someone invested in Rust, but that's where I'm coming from.

> I want to dig into one of these editors for a stronger understanding of how they work, and using something as obtuse as Rust is a total nonstarter for me.

I would be absolutely amazed if the language is what makes an editor easy/hard to understand unless that thing is written in whitespace/brainfuck. In this particular case the helix codebase is incredible easy to understand and contribute to, definitely easier than vim, neovim and others _despite_ the fact that it's written in Rust.