> I'm not sure how Rust crates (or other compilation units) map to those - my guess would be that a given crate will be compiled into (in win32 terms) a .exe .l

> I'm not sure how Rust crates (or other compilation units) map to those - my guess would be that a given crate will be compiled into (in win32 terms) a .exe .lib or .dll You're correct. > but to me this still feels more like a simple-vs-easy trade off [1] than a strict win. If you're meaning the easy side is stopping people having to reorder fields themselves, it's more than that: generics plus C++-style monomorphisation/specialisation mean there are cases when it's impossible for the definition of the type to choose the right order. For instance: given struct CountedPair<A,B> { x: u32, a: A, b: B }, all three of CountedPair<u64, u64>, CountedPair<u64, u8> and CountedPair<u16, u8> need different orders.