There are many people who considered it and rejected, or even moved to other languages. C++ developers with existing large codebases may never switch to anything else, but that doesn't mean that the rest of the world is stuck. People are writing databases, browsers, operating systems and device drivers in rust right now and eventually some of those will become successful project defining state of the art.
> I'd like to see a version of Rust with garbage collection. The language itself is good.
There are myriads of languages with GC. There are very few modern ones without it.
Why? What is the added value?
More importantly, it could be very useful to interact with code in garbage collected languages while having Rust model of the behavior of the garbage collector using its type system.
I could be off base. I haven't programmed in Rust. I've just skimmed through the documentation and little code projects written in it every once and a while.
Learning D and Rust requires an effort Go proponents are not capable of.
Another problem is that both D and Rust try to replace C++ and C respectively. But C++ and C developers would never switch to anything else as they feel comfortable using the later, even despite all the gotcha of manual memory management.
Most people using Go today come from Python,Ruby,PHP,JS and co, not from C or C++ or Java. They want performances, without paying a price for "complexity". D is fine today, but it lacks a community behind it and a good ecosystem for web development.
If Rust had garbage collection, it would certainly be more popular but it's not going to replace C anyway. We are stuck with C and C++, they are not going away.
I understand why Rust is what it is, I also understand that most developers don't want to deal with explicit move semantics and lifetime management. Rust isn't going to seduce Ruby,Python,PHP or Javascript developers. the later only want better performances and think Go is good enough. They don't care about explicit memory management.
I'd like to see a version of Rust with garbage collection. The language itself is good.