FWIW, I would consider a good chunk of Rust 2018 to be refinements on the language and the syntax. The amount of thought that has gone into those changes is eno

FWIW, I would consider a good chunk of Rust 2018 to be refinements on the language and the syntax. The amount of thought that has gone into those changes is enormous. I mean, if you just look at the new things in Rust 2018[1], then basically every single one of those is a refinement or clarification on an existing idea. The major exceptions are async/await, SIMD and maybe impl Trait. SIMD isn't a language change though; just an incredibly large std::arch library module. :-) impl Trait has fairly limited scope in my view. I think its primary advantage at this point is to make it easier to write compositional code when dealing with futures. It is hard to say "no" to some new language features because many of them are very very strongly motivated by incredibly compelling use cases. async/await is the big one. Rust's direction is nothing if not pragmatic, and async/await is kind of the obvious direction to head in if we want people to be able to write asynchronous code happily. [1] - https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/edition-guide/2018/status.html https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/edition-guide/2018/statu...