Rewriting Rust

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2024-09-26 06:00:03

You know what I mean. Like the first iPhone - which was amazing by the way. They made an entire operating system around multitouch. A smart phone with no keyboard. And a working web browser. Within a few months, we all realised what the iPhone really wanted to be. Only, the first generation iphone wasn't quite there. It didn't have 3G internet. There was no GPS chip. And there was no app store. In the next few years, iPhones would get a lot better.

I fell in love with Rust at the start. Algebraic types? Memory safety without compromising on performance? A modern package manager? Count me in. But now that I've been programming in rust for 4 years or so, it just feels like its never quite there.

And I don't know if it will ever be there. Progress on the language has slowed so much. When I first started using it, every release seemed to add new, great features in stable rust. Now? Crickets. The rust "unstable book" lists 700 different unstable features - which presumably are all implemented, but which have yet to be enabled in stable rust. Most of them are changes to the standard library - but seriously. Holy cow.

Features like Coroutines. This RFC is 7 years old now. Make no mistake - coroutines are implemented in the compiler. They're just, not available for us "stable rust" peasants to use. If coroutines were a child, they would be in grade school by now. At this point, the coroutines RFC has lasted longer than World War 1 or 2.

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