[jeroenvlek]

Strongly agree, yet debates about improving the ergonomics of the language, for which there clearly "is a market", seem to be hindered by those zealous activists. A minority, I'm certain, but vocal nonetheless.

It really can be small stuff too, like hiding that nested generic "GC adjacent" type salad to be accessible only if you need it, via a type alias. Yes, I can define that myself, but the point is that a lot of people need it often, given its widespread use.l, so why not provide one?

I'm sure there's reasons not to do the above example, but that's not the point. It feels like Rust is at 95% of being amazing, and that the remaining 5% is attainable if we want to.

[saghm]

I used to think that it was more likely that Rust would "expand upward" to provide the higher level syntax that people want in a language like I describe above, but it does seem like the language development has vastly slowed down in terms of big new features. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing; plenty of people didn't like how much churn there was in the first several years after Rust 1.0 came out. I personally didn't mind since I never ran into any significant breakage in what I worked on, but I definitely noticed a change in how open companies seemed to be to use Rust in any capacity coinciding with Rust's releases growing smaller on average; I think "frequency of major language features" is often used as a proxy for "language maturity".

At this point, I think a new language is more likely to provide this niche than Rust, and I also don't think that has to be a bad thing. Having Rust scoped more to lower-level programming where you're more worried about things like minimizing heap usage and avoiding copying strings or whatever rather than trying to be all things to all users might end up with a better experience in the long run.

[jeroenvlek]

Lol, and there are the downvotes