> Rust is not the answer, it is simply a step towards the answer.
True that.
On one hand, it's amazing. On the other hand, the nagging feeling that we still have work to go in programming language design has not gone away.
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Structured concurrency. Don't provide "legacy" mechanisms and "opt in" for structure, just bite the bullet. Like the first language which told people no, we don't "go-to" other functions, that's not happening in my language, that was structured program flow I want structured concurrency, it's a thing but it's not yet popular enough to do that as the only provided concurrency, it should be.
Smart arithmetic. Your computer has Floating Point math. FP math is fast, but, it's hard for humans to think about exactly where they lose precision and performance while using it. I should be able to write the real mathematics I want, specify the precision I need and possibly the performance trades I'm comfortable with, and the compiler not me the programmer, figures out how to use FP math to calculate my mathematics with acceptable precision or tells me that I made demands it couldn't meet or which are nonsensical.
On the other hand, two things I really liked to see when I learned Rust:
&[T]: The slice reference type, a fat pointer which specifies where zero or more contiguous Ts are, and, how many of them. This is the Right Thing™ and it's right there in the core language design, which means you don't need to go back and retro-fit it.
String: The simplest possible way to build the growable text type, as a growable array of bytes but with the strict requirement that the array's content is always UTF-8 text. Is the "Small String Optimization" a cool trick? Yeah, but it need not live in this core vocabulary type. How about Copy-on-write ? Ditto. What about other text encodings? Transcode at the edges if you need that.