[steveklabnik]

We are always constantly trying to listen to people and get feedback; for example, it's one of the reasons I pay such close attention to these threads!

There's always room for improvement, but iterating in this way is defintely a core value.

[IanCal]

Depending on what group you're trying to attract or improve the experience with, you could potentially setup contracts with the level of person you would like to deal with and pay them to implement something in rust while you monitor their progress & with full access to their work and what they're doing.

[vertex-four]

The issue is, of course, that the more you focus on specific tasks the more your language becomes "designed for" those tasks, and the language becomes less general. The language already went through some of this with Servo - the DOM would be much easier to implement with an object-oriented language, but that wouldn't fit in well with the rest of Rust and would significantly raise complexity.

[IanCal]

That is a concern but the other risk is by not doing this the language progresses in areas people happen to currently use it, which will be skewed by what it's already good at. You can then end up never improving for those cases it's weakest. This covers types of programs but also experience levels and histories of the programmers themselves.

You are right however that you need to carefully pick the tasks to fit with the original aims of the language.

Perhaps a good way of phrasing this is "why aren't X people using rust for Y?".