Successful eco systems are pragmatic and idiomatically straightforward.
Everything & the kitchen sink in a language is not a recipe for success.
Every language that has a long lifespan spent a long time in feature minimal stasis too. The world won't learn a moving target.
I learned Rust a few years ago and without keeping up with the latest changes too much I still feel confident I can work on current code.
So, I think the argument that "very special features" shouldn't be counted toward language complexity/growth is wrong, IMO. I would even say that there needs to be even more focus on those features, since they tend to be not widely known, not familar, and often there is less documentation about them, so the likelyhood that they make code hard to understand is even higher.
This is not to say that those features are unnecessary. I just don't think the justification "they are not what a pragmatic programmer will see" is good.
- sugar for quality of life improvements that benefits everyone (like ? or NLL)
- new feature that lets you do something that couldn't be done before (like impl Trait or global allocators)
- new feature that removes a special case of the semantics that can be extrapolated from already present features (like associated consts and subslice patterns)
1) It's obvious the feature is being used.
2) The feature is easy to look up without knowing what it's called, just based on how it's been used.
3) It's easy to understand what the feature actually does, with the appropriate context.
Building C++ (or C) projects is such a clusterfuck that it's given rise to header-only libraries.
In Rust, everything is "cargo build", and adding a dependency is one line. This has only failed for me when there's a dependency on a C system library that I can't satisfy.
Is it bad to have too many dependencies? Sure, maybe. Is that an excuse to have artificial friction? No. I eagerly await the day when meson or conan or whatever becomes The C++ Dependency And Package Manager.
My other favorite part of Rust is the elitist language features like iterators, immutable borrows, functional programming, etc.
So many of these features Rust adds just fill in holes in an already extensive ecosystem.
I agree some feature development could be toned down to mitigate the moving target problem.. hell I think last years poll expressed roughly that. But, I think there's still a ton of features yet to come that merely complete what we already have.