Disclaimer: I know practically nothing about Rust outside of observing from the HN side lines. Looking at the change log, it seems that they also removed the "

Disclaimer: I know practically nothing about Rust outside of observing from the HN side lines. Looking at the change log, it seems that they also removed the "static" keyword, so that class vs member methods are distinguished by the presence of a first argument named self. A little further down, they mention ~self, &self, and @self. Those prefixes differentiate types of special purpose pointers. So it seems the goal was not explicit self, so much as it was explicit pointer type annotations for self.