I recently picked up rust for a personal infrastructure project and was amazed at the amount of progress on the language and tooling over the years.
I was able to get up and running fast. Between rustup and cargo it’s dead simple to get a project set up and there is little to no fragmentation in the ecosystem. No fiddling with different package managers, bundlers, test runners—just one tool I already know. It takes me a full day to figure out how to do something similar with TypeScript and the hellscape that is JavaScript tooling.
Speaking of tooling, between the rust-analyzer and the compiler, knocking out glue code between a few libraries is super easy. Type inference and lifetime elision seems to have gotten significantly better. Autocomplete and docstrings are pletiful. Compiler errors are still best in class, especially coming from Python and mypy. Altogether, rust nails the airplane test with flying colors.
I spent some time reading up on new language features. I don’t have a feel for how compile times are yet until I have something non-trivial, but I’m glad is being prioritized. Coming from Rust 2018 edition, some of the stabalizations and changes sound very useful like inline const, additions to prelude, IntoIterator for arrays, and so on. I haven’t looked at async rust to see if it’s any less painful but I’m really trying to avoid that for now.
There are new libraries that have taken off during my time away which are relevant to my interest. Rowan for parsing. Axum for building web servers on top of Hyper (which is now 1.0!). Jiff for dates. Tantivy as an alternative to Lucene.