[tatterdemalion]

- We are directing material resources (as in, hours of paid work) to improving compiler performance. We consider this a serious problem, and "the compiler performance is always improving" is not an accurate gloss of the amount of work people are putting into solving it.

- We would love to have a REPL but there are nontrivial technical challenges, and it has not been a major requested feature by our users.

- I have never heard the complaint about the size of packages before now; I have no idea how we compare to other languages in this regard.

I've witnessed some of the conversations you're talking about (I think I engaged with you about REPLs in the past), and I think the "true-believer syndrome" has more to do with how you interpret the answers you receive than with the behavior of anyone else.

[kod]

Only listening to current users for feature requests is selection bias.

I'm not currently using rust, and lack of a repl is a big strike against it. Not as much of a strike as the lack of a good stable async story, but still.

[steveklabnik]

We explicitly reach out to willing non-users to try and counteract said bias.