Yeah, Rust is really interesting, and something I'd like to try on a real project. Hopefully I'll be able to do something with it this spring. But it's certainl

Yeah, Rust is really interesting, and something I'd like to try on a real project. Hopefully I'll be able to do something with it this spring. But it's certainly more appealing as a replacement than, say, Go, which I don't think is really even that interesting as a language (but this is a personal opinion which I'm not willing to argue about on the internet). Rust also would immediately solve some things I find particulary annoying about C++ (lack of sum types, inability to create new types that behave identically to old types, etc). One thing that I think would be nice to have in a hypothetical language is vector support for integral types, the same way OpenCL has. The Eigen library for C++ is IMO a really good example of the "Edward C++hands" phenomenon. It's a terrific library, using C++ template magic to produce optimized assembly for your platform, to achieve performance you just can't get with C. On the other hand, it can be annoying to use, since there are places where the C++ warts come out, and the developers have to put in an extraordinary amount of effort just to get there. If you had this kind of thing built into the language, it's much easier for everyone involved: compiler authors, programmers, library developers, etc.