Rust 2024...the year of everywhere?
I’ve been thinking about what “Rust 2024” will look like lately. I don’t really mean the edition itself — but more like, what will Rust feel like after we’ve finished up the next few years of work? I think the answer is that Rust 2024 is going to be the year of “everywhere”. Let me explain what I mean. Up until now, Rust has had a lot of nice features, but they only work sometimes. By the time 2024 rolls around, they’re going to work everywhere that you want to use them, and I think that’s going to make a big difference in how Rust feels.
Let’s start with async. Right now, you can write async functions, but not in traits. You can’t write async closures. You can’t use async drop. This creates a real hurdle. You have to learn the workarounds (e.g., the async-trait crate), and in some cases, there are no proper workarounds (e.g., for async-drop).
Thanks to a recent PR by Michael Goulet, static async functions in traits almost work on nightly today! I’m confident we can work out the remaining kinks soon and start advancing the static subset (i.e., no support for dyn trait) towards stabilization.
