[pcwalton]

> This is like optimising for the least readable code possible. I imagine it's going to be a nightmare in practise.

We've written hundreds of thousands of lines of Rust and this has never been an issue. The typechecker will catch any misuses of semicolons.

> What I do care about is being able to tell exactly what some code does by glancing at it, without worrying too much about whether someone wrote = instead of ==.

The typechecker will catch misuses of = versus == as well. So assuming that the code you're looking at passes the typechecker, you don't have to mentally distinguish between = and ==.

> However for now, I much prefer the KISS approach taken by Go, in spite of a couple of things missing from the language (that will probably get there in the end).

They're different languages. Go does not have memory safety without garbage collection, and will never have it while remaining backwards compatible. But that was an explicit design goal of Rust. That is why Rust has the lifetime and unique pointer support, which allows Rust to support safe low-level programming in a way that wasn't possible before.