Just to clarify, are you referring to Rust using SIMD by way of LLVM, or by way of being able to use SIMD primitives / intrinsics directly in Rust code?
The former works much better than I had anticipated. I've been surprised by the extent that my iterator code ends up vectorized without me doing much work.
The latter does not give me warm Rust feelings today. There's a SIMD crate, but it doesn't look maintained and only works with the nightly compiler releases. I didn't think there was any stable way to do inline assembly, so I think linking C is my best bet here?
Yeah, the person formerly working on simd is no longer able to contribute to random open source projects. It's still something the Rust team wants to make stable, just not right now. SIMD is a bit complicated because you need to address target support in a straightforward way.
If you mean productivity as "memory safe and no null pointer errors" then Yes, Rust is productive compared to C,C++ or even Go. If you mean productivity as "ease of use" then no, Rust is not easy to learn or to use compared to Go.
Rust was absolutely designed for programmer productivity. Source: I was one of the designers.
> GC is incredible productivity boost which is why no recent language (except Rust) does manual memory management.
That's true, it is a productivity boost. But it also has a cost. Rust didn't want to pay that cost, especially when the same mechanisms are useful for preventing data races. (In fact, removal of GC was something that happened as a consequence of the data race freedom features; it wasn't a design goal from the beginning.)
> Compile times in Go are a fraction of Rust compile times, which is another productivity boost.
And rustc performs much more optimization. Again, a tradeoff.
> Go gives you one good way to do concurrency, Rust believes in tyranny of choice.
That's untrue. Go has threads, channels, mutexes, condition variables, and atomics. Rust has threads, channels, mutexes, condition variables, and atomics. The only thing I can think of that Rust has that Go doesn't is, like, SIMD, and I'm sure your comment wasn't just referring to SIMD.