That's true. More importantly, Rust and Kotlin work on improving things that matter to users, not on features that read nicely in a paper, but are largely irrel

That's true. More importantly, Rust and Kotlin work on improving things that matter to users, not on features that read nicely in a paper, but are largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Just compare Rust's announcement on tooling (https://www.ncameron.org/blog/dev-tools-in-2018/ https://www.ncameron.org/blog/dev-tools-in-2018/) with the state in Scala, where pretty much every promised improvement has been "around the corner" for the last 5 years. :-/ Not sure much how much can or will change here, given the departures of experienced tooling contributors in 2017.