[kibwen]

True, Rust has more syntactic rules than Go, but it's still (in my mind) a very small language, especially compared to C++. The developers are very conscious of language complexity and will not introduce new concepts spuriously. The increased complexity is because they're aiming Rust at a different application domain than Go, and for that application domain they feel that programmers require more fine-grained control.

[markokocic]

Every language is small compared to C++. And keep in mind that Rust is still very young, and if simplicity is not a goal complexity can skyrocket before Rust reach 1.0 state.

[kibwen]

  > Every language is small compared to C++.

Good point. :)

However, the devs are aiming to keep the language simple. They're PL experts (watching them at work is quite intimidating, actually, as someone who doesn't have a PhD in CS), but they absolutely reject the allure of the ivory tower. Note the header on the page linked in this submission:

"a safe, concurrent, practical language"

Note "practical". I've witnessed several exchanges on the mailing list where the developers attempt to excise language features. For example, in Rust, `if` is an expression rather than a statement, and thus is redundant with the `?:` ternary conditional expression syntax familiar to C-like languages (the latter was removed). Alternatively, they often acknowledge that having three types of pointers is suboptimal from a simplicity perspective, but they consistently conclude that the semantics unique to each type of pointer are valuable enough to justify the mental cost.

[pcwalton]

Simplicity is definitely a goal. These days, not a day goes by on the Rust team in which we don't discuss ways to simplify the language.

My colleague Dave Herman always says that language design goes through cycles: You identify a problem, add solutions to fix it, then discover that these solutions are best merged with some other ideas. The result is that, as a language evolves, complexity goes up and down. I think that we're coming off a peak of complexity and the language is going to evolve toward simplicity in the near term.

Just to name a few simple examples, removing the alias analysis pass and removing "native modules" are some simplifications that mostly have consensus at this point.

[markokocic]

I'm glad simplicity is taken into consideration early on, because simple is not easy[1] to achieve when language goes into production.

[1]http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy