If the cart is moving slowly I’m going to point out it’s moving slowly. If you want to take that personally that’s your problem, but I’d prefer to be honest about the situation.
The fact of the matter is significant language features have stalled. And comments like the one i quoted are passive aggressive when you consider they’re casting doubt on whether certain language features will ever see the light of day.
It’s especially disheartening when you don’t really hear much from the language team and it doesn’t seem like progress is being made on these language features.
GGP here. I think you’re both right. As a formerly involved contributor I can assure you that there are legitimately hard problems, and that there are very bright people working on it.
However, the reason why it’s so hard, is imo because Rust matured itself so quickly, by basically having a bunch of 10x mega brains lay a foundation of insufficient but unchangeable features and then leave a lot of details to be solved later when (a) there are much more people and stakeholders involved and (b) there are much more promises made around governance, stability etc. And, as it turns out, laying the “remaining pieces of the puzzle” is harder, especially if you’re not allowed to move the initial pieces.
This in turn creates an incongruence for outside observers, where it appears like development is slower (which is true) because people are incompetent/lazy/prioritize badly (which is not true).
The mistake here, in my humble opinion, is moving ahead so quickly many years ago. Async is the perfect example of this, but as I alluded to earlier, I think allowing leaks was a similarly rushed decision, and that was much earlier. If I were to bet, people were excited about maturing the language for production, but, since there was sooo much uncharted territory, there were novel subtle challenges which during the frenzy appeared like they could be solved quickly with brainpower alone to meet the deadlines and keep the excitement going. But even the wrinkliest of brains can’t deduce the implications of 4th order effects down the line - you have to try it out and build real life things. You have to be humble, when everyone else isn’t.
By what benchmark is it moving slowly, and are you qualified to make that judgement? You might be quite correct, but I don't have enough context to know what role you've played and without context you're coming across as "being loud and obnoxious on the Internet" which isn't (I think?) what you're aiming to be.
The fact of the matter is significant language features have stalled. And comments like the one i quoted are passive aggressive when you consider they’re casting doubt on whether certain language features will ever see the light of day.
It’s especially disheartening when you don’t really hear much from the language team and it doesn’t seem like progress is being made on these language features.