Rust 1.72.0
I love using Rust in my toy projects (and wish my job was more open to anything but C++, but oh well). With its functional-style iterators, sum types and pattern matching, Rust lets me write code in a way that just feels natural. And the borrow checker stopped bothering me once I embraced reference-counted pointers for those cases where lifetimes are not obvious. Compilation time also hasn&#x27;t been much of an issue once I moved to using dylibs for dependencies [1]. So if you want to use Rust but are wary of those problems, don&#x27;t be! :)<p>With that said, I can&#x27;t help but feel that Rust development has noticeably slowed down over the years. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I appreciate the hard work behind each release! It&#x27;s just that, from my totally uninformed bystander perspective, there&#x27;s been a sharp drop in people working on the language and compiler full-time since around Mozilla layoffs, and Rust still hasn&#x27;t recovered from that. It&#x27;s surprising and quite disappointing to see no significant manpower commitment from other corporations using Rust, like Microsoft [2] and Google [3].<p>As a result, while there&#x27;s definitely new exciting things happening, more and more issues are piling up, many sitting unaddressed for years. Granted, it&#x27;s mostly the small things that you can live without, but they all add up. Here are some examples just off the top of my head:<p>1. If-let chains [4] and if-let guards [5], proposed back in 2018, are still not there. I constantly encounter cases where having them would make the code much shorter and clearer. I guess that depends on what you do, though. My code is heavy on state machines and pattern matching, otherwise this may be less of an issue.<p>2. Const generics are still very limited (no const trait impls [6], no enums as const generic parameters [7], no float arithmetic in const [8], etc.). I understand those are hard problems, but most are known for 3-5 years by now, and there&#x27;s no finishing line in sight. Comparing const in Rust to constexpr in modern C++ will leave you disappointed.<p>There&#x27;s definitely more problems that I hit less frequently, but each compiler error linking me to some stabilization issue with years-long discussion takes away a bit of joy...<p>And yet I heartily recommend trying out Rust if you haven&#x27;t done so yet! Behind those papercuts hides a very practical and empowering language that gives you functional constructs at high performance and with much lower chance of shooting yourself in the foot as a newbie compared to C++.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;robert.kra.hn&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2022-09-09-speeding-up-incremental-rust-compilation-with-dylibs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;robert.kra.hn&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2022-09-09-speeding-up-increment...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.windows.com&#x2F;windows-insider&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;12&#x2F;announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-25905&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.windows.com&#x2F;windows-insider&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;12&#x2F;announc...</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.googleblog.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;rust-in-android-platform.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;security.googleblog.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;rust-in-android-plat...</a>
[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;53667">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;53667</a>
[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;51114">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;51114</a>
[6] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;67792">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;67792</a>
[7] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;95174">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;95174</a>
[8] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;57241">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;57241</a>