This is a group of people working on different approaches, but trying to find some commonality. You’d have to compare against each of them to really know.
Insinuating that research is not doing "anything useful", while at the same time calling Rust "pragmatic/useful" is particularly ironic. Rust's design has been heavily influenced by research in programming language theory and adjacent fields: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-wiki-backup/blob/master/No...