[sanderjd]

What an amazing article. I can't believe I missed it when he wrote it.

I followed Rust in the very early days and definitely came away with the sense in this article. I would have said (and may have said to some people) that Graydon is really great, but that the exciting things about Rust weren't the things he liked or cared about; basically the expressivity and zero cost abstractions sections of this article.

But reading the article he linked about first class modules, I think that seems pretty good, and I think he's definitely right about making borrowing "second class" without explicit lifetimes (or at least discouraging them more so than the language does today), and about existential types (I'm always surprised I don't see these more in library APIs).

I also had no idea he wanted built in bignums. In pre-1.0 (and pre-cargo) rust, I created a very incomplete library for that, and would have loved to have it built in instead. Also yeah, decimal literals would be excellent.

But I didn't find the async vs. green threads section convincing. The green thread implementation wasn't a great fit at the time it existed, and I haven't seen anything since then that convinces me there was some great solution available to make it work better. Async isn't great in rust, but it's a much better fit, and I think it can be used well. I have hopes that best practices developing over time and maybe language features or changes can push people in a more sane direction of usage (once it becomes more clear what that should be).