Another year already and I’m still knocking myself out using Rust. It is also the year where I can use Rust in a professional environment with people interested in the technology. Let’s review my last year post and try to come up with what I think Rust should focused on for the next year.

Rust 2019

I’ve revisited my last year post to see if any of my wishes has been fulfilled during this year.

IDE Support

No being unrespectful to the people working on RLS , I still feel this component to be disappointing and not giving a great UX. I even abandoned it and use rust-analyzer now, even if it is far from being production ready, it gives me a spark of joy when using it, when RLS only frustrated me with the lack of responsiveness.

⇒ So, no, IDE support is not done yet.

UI Development

Nothing has really changed on this topic for a production ready, idiomatic, full Rust solution… yet. Some major work is being done with Druid and we can only hope that this initiative will bloom soon into the Rust way of doing GUIs. To be fair, I haven’t tried it so I don’t have any opinion on it, but from the feedbacks I can see, it seems pretty great, and it’s leaded by Ralph Levien (I think, as the repo is under xi-editor org), so it will be clever. ;)

⇒ So, not yet.

Compilation speed

Big improvements have been conducted this year, spread on rustc itself but also on cargo . But we have to admit that it is still slow at the moment.

⇒ Progress, but not there yet.

Installation speed

rustup 1.20 introduced the profile system and it solves the problem for me!

⇒ It’s a yay!

Communication

This aspect is also getting better, with new blogs and more WG.

⇒ It’s a yay!

No More Rush

Nothing to notice on a mistake because of rushing things like the web site last year. If I recall properly, the async/await has even been postponed to 1.39 when the initial plan was targeting 1.38.

⇒ It’s a yay!

Rust 2020

Without surprise, many stuff from last year will still be there.

IDE Support

This bit is critical for Rust adoption by the masses. IntelliJ Rust plug-in is doing some great progress and I have big hopes for rust-analyzer (I’m trying to contribute more on it as well). But the task it’s hard, and I’m pretty sure that this item will still be in my list by next year. Still, the effort must continue. :)

Compilation Speed

The progress must continue on this field to the point where sceptical people will have one less argument in their pocket to use. :D One aspect could be serving pre-compiled binaries from the crates registries. But raw compilation speed should not be under considered (and I know it’s not).

UI Development

Rust is already great for CLI tools, and I’d like to see this level of power in the desktop application area as well. Druid seems promising, but according to Ralph himself, it will take years… so go go Druid!

Embedded Stuff

That’s new for this year! I’m using embedded Rust at work now and I’m really grateful to the people of the community for helping me grasping some concepts. The ergonomic could be better but svd2rust already empowered me to play with registers, thing that I’ve never done before, and that I’d probably screw up in C.

One thing to improve is maybe some way to complete the svd file with parts that the manufacturer didn’t put in. I had to patch the generated code to add some interruption handlers needed for the proprietary radio part of the chip. I also had to path the svd file to access to the ROMTABLE and might do it again to access to DEVICEINFO later.

A way to it in a declarative way as an input to svd2rust would be great.

Reproducible Build

Working on embedded, sometime the binary is not the same from a build to another, with the same source code. Not great in an embedded world where moving a function can have catastrophic consequences. So this must be addressed, and the sooner the better.

Binary Size

Part of this new job, a colleague (hard C/asm coder) is always surprised by the size of the produce binary. And it’s true that Rust binaries are big. Not really important on desktop, it became critical in embedded world. I don’t know what can be done about it when a "Hello, world!" in C compiles to 101,376 bytes with VS 2017 ( -O2 ) against 149,504 bytes for the Rust version ( --release , 1.38), but hey, this is a wish list! :p

Rust 2021

Like last year, I still think that the theme for a new edition (if any), should be confidence. We still have a very moving ecosystem. I gave the example of error handling last year. And it’s still relevant this year with yet another error management crate ( anyhow ), which is super great, but make the ecosystem shaking again. I don’t even need to mention async/await that will change the landscape of web framework, and will probably push me to rewrite my little backend project.

Tooling on the IDE, needs to reach some level of usability. Maybe it’s time to ditch RLS to focus on rust-analyzer which already provides a better user experience even if it’s not 1.0 yet.

And even if this past year have seen more sponsoring from big names (Amazon and Microsoft), there’s still the need to push Rust into more big vendors. Like chip manufacturers who still have a full C stack only. Having them to provide Rust API would give a big boost of confidence in the language.