Re:Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth
by steveklabnik on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @06:43PM
(#18765889)
One thing that’s come out of this years’ posts by various people is that, after those features have landed, people generally do want things to be done. These features shore up major weaknesses in the language for various domains, but there’s not really things not in that list that many people still extremely desire.
Re:Rust 2019 and beyond: limits to some growth
by the_duke on Thursday December 27, 2018 @03:13PM
(#18772238)
Totally agree that the features I mentioned address shortcomings.
And while I think Rust could do just fine without GATs, specialization is something I'd really hope for.
People will never be satisfied though and always ask for new features.
I have been using Rust extensively for over 2 years.
In those two years, the language complexity has increased substantially. It's already at a stage where I'm worried about losing track.
Also, there is quite a large amount of changes in the pipeline that were already accepted but are either not finished or not implemented yet. All of those can/will have a significant impact on idiomatic code and API design and will increase the complexity burden:
* specialization * generic associated types (a simple form of higher kinded types) * async/await + generators * existential types * const generics ...
So I do believe Rust needs to slow down considerably and get much stricter with accepting new features. Both to not overwhelm the existing userbase and to not make the language another C++ in terms of complexity.