[kibwen]

> from my totally uninformed bystander perspective, there's been a sharp drop in people working on the language and compiler full-time since around Mozilla layoffs, and Rust still hasn't recovered from that

In terms of number of commits to the rust-lang/rust repo, activity peaked in late 2019/early 2020, whereas the Mozilla layoffs took place in late 2020. Activity since late 2020 has mostly stayed stable, and remains well above where it was at any point prior to 2018: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors

In addition, I know of several former Mozillians who remain employed to work on Rust, including one who heads the Rust team at Amazon.

As far as the number of contributors to each release, it's currently hovering around an all-time average high (although a handful of past releases have anomalously high peaks): https://thanks.rust-lang.org/

The reason that progress appears slower these days is because the low-hanging feature fruit has mostly been plucked, and what's left are the harder problems. Maintenance tasks don't make for very interesting release notes. In addition, as the language matures much of the interesting feature work has shifted from the compiler/stdlib to tooling like Cargo, rust-analyzer, etc. (whose activity might not be reflected in the above graphs).