I am very glad to not have Rust end up along that path (I am sympathetic to the threading idea he mentioned though).
Rust as an alternative to C++ does, for me, involve all of the weird magical nonsense that you kind of need to get any of this working. The extreme use of generics to build out DSLs to get things working. General libraries being very hard to write, but still possible, to get alright ergonomics for usage itself. And yeah... the zero-cost abstraction thing.
I think Graydon-Rust would have also been very interesting, but it sounds unappealing to me, person who wants "C++ but nicer".
But to his point... saying "you could have much faster compile times" is very tempting! Just, especially when it's messing around with Rust "for fun", the ergonomics sound pretty unfun.
Go is actually a competitor with StandardML and loses badly in every way except having Google's deep pockets to carry it.
StandardML uses a far superior Hindley-Milner type system. It has pattern matching. It has Option types for good error handling. It doesn't have bad features (for GC'd languages) like direct pointers and slices. It has immutability by default. CML even offers a better take on channels too. Modules keep interfaces more standardized (superior for big projects IMO). And to top it all off, SML is easier to learn than Go. It's also as fast as Go (despite the compilers being a side project).
Go's only advantage is more extensive libraries, but that would be fixable in SML with just a fraction of the money Google spent on Go.
Rust as an alternative to C++ does, for me, involve all of the weird magical nonsense that you kind of need to get any of this working. The extreme use of generics to build out DSLs to get things working. General libraries being very hard to write, but still possible, to get alright ergonomics for usage itself. And yeah... the zero-cost abstraction thing.
I think Graydon-Rust would have also been very interesting, but it sounds unappealing to me, person who wants "C++ but nicer".
But to his point... saying "you could have much faster compile times" is very tempting! Just, especially when it's messing around with Rust "for fun", the ergonomics sound pretty unfun.