I have tried Rust in the past, though not on this particular hobby project (my Clojure interpreter). I found it hard to get into, and I've gotten into a lot of languages in my time-- some of which are considered challenging (e.g. Haskell). With Rust, I always felt I spent too much time wrestling with it, and not enough time being productive. I imagine that you hit a threshold at some point and that begins to change. But for my side projects, that bar wasn't worth jumping.

Rust's major goals this year are around learnability and productivity; maybe come check it out again someday :)

Could you point to any materials (e.g. blog post, roadmap document...) that deal with this? Thanks.

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/07/05/Rust-Roadmap-Update.ht... is our "the year is half over" update, and has a link to the overall goals right at the top.

Awesome, thanks!

Inferred lifetimes? A man can hope :).

Inferring lifetimes from the implementation of a function won't happen for the same reason that inferring types won't happen: it is really nice for the signature of a function to not automatically be changed if the body is changed, instead programmers should be told when they might be breaking their users.

However, the compiler could (and did, I believe) run inference and suggest a fix that the programmer can explicitly include.

If it were always possible to infer all lifetimes, we'd do it. Unfortunately that's not the case.

There are a number of RFCs in the pipeline to help with lifetimes, including more elision. In no particular order:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2115

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2094

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2093

Rust's documentation is very well written. The authors have put in great effort to make things clear.

Granted Rust has some paradigms and constructs which are not easy to learn, I found it rather exciting. I think it has future scope.

Wonder whats happening with Redox. I hope Rust adds more libraries, especially network related, since the networked world is increasingly looking like a distributed OS of sort. Browsers are looking like an OS or a shell inside the OS. Browsers are getting more complex with more functionalities added every few months. Not sure I expressed my thoughts correctly, but I guess one can understand what I mean.

Rust should move away from C standard library, if possible.

> Wonder whats happening with Redox.

They've been involved in Google Summer of Code, and so have had lots of status update posts lately, here's the latest: https://redox-os.org/news/gsoc-self-hosting-final/

> Rust should move away from C standard library, if possible.

It's not always possible, but on systems where it is, there's some ability to do so, see https://github.com/japaric/steed

Thanks Steve.

>It's not always possible, but on systems where it is, there's some ability to do so, see https://github.com/japaric/steed

Doesn't linking to it make a Rust program "unsafe", in the Rust sense? Or my understanding is probably not correct.

Using unsafe inside of safe is totally fine. See https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/safe-unsafe-meaning.html for more.

Cheers, thanks.