As for the lifetime annotations, we could be extending lifetime elision to more places, including to struct definitions, if people come up with rules that are easy enough to understand. I'd probably be for it, but there are others who think that if you go too far toward removing lifetime annotations then you actually make programs more difficult to understand and the language harder to teach. But that was also the argument against our current lifetime elision rules, which are pretty fantastic in retrospect, so I'm not particularly swayed.
Though I do feel a bit let out after reading http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/turpl/_book/vec.html which implements Vec from scratch, as it's not super simple.
But really, that would be impossible in Go, just as tricky in C++ (if you make it stl compatible), and impossible in implement generically without lots of void* stuff in C, so I guess I wasn't sure what I was expecting. It's a pain to implement fundamental data-structures I guess.
Still, if you've got anything new to say, go ahead and say it.
It sounds like you don't want memory safety without garbage collection, based on your last paragraph, and that's totally fine! My use cases aren't necessarily your use cases, and I don't want to claim that everyone who truly doesn't care about zero-overhead memory safety is wrong. But I think it's defensible that memory safety is an important feature for many projects (for example, the ones I work on) in 2015, even if it results in an additional learning curve. The disease we're trying to cure is a never-ending stream of security vulnerabilities and crashes in systems code, and none of the attempts to solve the problem that have existed so far have worked.
Please do. I'd love to hear your thoughts on issues.
Unfortunately, it has lots of warts that have sent me crawling back to C++. Addressing the particular item you're talking about here, manually specifying lifetimes of objects is a cure that's worse than the disease. It's great when the compiler infers everything for you, but I'm never going to be able to explain the syntax or semantics of those ugly 'a marks to my coworkers who aren't interested in programming language theory.
Anyways, I've been tempted to write a full blog post listing all of my Rust complaints, but I figured it's better to just quietly let you guys enjoy your thing. However, whenever I see these advocacy posts from you and the other Rust honchos, I can't help but scream a little bit inside. It's really not as good as it could've been.
To be really specific: it's great that you got "zero-overhead memory-safety", but I can't even implement fundamental data structures without using unsafe blocks and lifetime annotations.