Nire Bryce

Low effort because I don't have the motivation to write an actual blog post.

focus on cleanup

There's a lot of technical debt in Rust, we should deal with it now.

why?

• Rust is at a point where it will continue to be relevant for a long time¹
• any new feature we add will only have a comparatively small impact as pretty much all core features are already in place
• cleaning up the implementation will speed up development in the long term
• the fewer people are currently using Rust, the easier it is to make tiny breaking changes to clean up the language. so do them early
• by cleaning up current features, we may cause future additions to be unnecessary, keeping the language smaller and consistent
• having unsound bugs sucks, we should fix those

what?

• cleanup the type system, mainly focussing on changes necessary to fix issues with the current system
  • trait solver refactor initiative
  • making implied bounds fully explicit in the type system
  • THAT'S ME NOW!
• cleanup other areas as well
  • provide a better API for our diagnostics, refactor existing diagnostics methods
    • an example is the ObligationCtxt which should make it easier to interact with the trait system for diagnostics.
  • pattern matching and MIR building
  • pretty much every area could use some work I guess, I am not the expert there though
• close stale tracking issues
  • the feature isn't too important if nothing happened for a while
  • the language changed since then, original reasoning is probably out of date
  • a lot of in-progress work makes it easy to accidentally stabilize stuff with a suboptimal design
• improve tooling
  • work on the language is getting less impactful over time
  • lots of major improvements still possible on tools though
  • we're at a point where working on rustfmt and cargo is probably far more impactful than working on rustc or the standard library

That's it

There's a bunch of other stuff which is going on but I don't have anything useful to add there. I either don't care too much or trust the people who are already thinking about these things.

1. until it is replaced by a language which is even better at combining performance, control, and safety.