When I first read Graydon talking about his plans for Rust, I pictured it as StandardML (or OCaml) without a garbage collector, and I was sold. This list doesn'

When I first read Graydon talking about his plans for Rust, I pictured it as StandardML (or OCaml) without a garbage collector, and I was sold. This list doesn't look fully like that, but is closer than current Rust is. My interest back then was in a higher level language with type inference and a modern ML-like type system but that could be used for systems programming, especially in database, virtual machine, and even operating system dev. These days I work pretty much full-time in Rust, and I think Rust as it is today delivers on some of that promise, but not all. I feel like the language's borrowing and ownership checking are pretty brilliant but really begin to become a pain when dealing with nested and interrelated trees of objects and iterators (like if building a compiler or query evaluator, etc.), and resorting to Arc/Rc/RefCell, etc. feels awkward. I'm not sure if the language Graydon talks about here would have been better for that or not. But I'm also happy we have Rust, because it's an improvement over what else is out there, and I hope the community gets through its growing pains.