People often speculate about this, which boggles me since graydon remarks positively on the current state of Rust all the time.

http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/247406.html

https://twitter.com/graydon_pub/status/886212237987368960

He even addresses the changes to the runtime:

https://twitter.com/graydon_pub/status/705226109856526336

Just to add (written just after 1.0): http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/214016.html

I think the above post indicates that he is extremely proud of how Rust turned out.

Not sure if comparing Rust's relevance to that of the gopher protocol is really a positive remark. ;)

The question he is answering is:

    "After memory safety, what do you think is the next big step for compiled languages to take?"

It might be that he thinks it has successfully pushed the state of the art in terms of regions and affine type systems, but that there are still things outside that to explore and push. 'Parametric mutability' seems to be at least in part a response to some patterns that have emerged in Rust due to the lack of this feature.

What direction would that be?

i can't find the previous hn submission, but i think he wrote a post about how much it has changed since its inception.

early Rust was quite different - not as low-level, had a GC, green threads, other stuff. some info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13533701