> Time will tell if we'll eventually look back some of Rust's design decisions as bad or unwieldy (probably).
I think time has already told for things like async and lifetimes.
I think time has already told for things like async and lifetimes.
As for lifetimes, what's the issue? Do you have any reason to believe lifetimes are frustrating because they were badly designed, rather than the fact that they're making complexity explicit which was previously hidden?
Lifetimes are painful, and a other languages are exploring better ergonomics or combining automatic memory management with affine/linear types, yet it was Rust's adoption that pushed other language designers to actually look into this. So from that point of view, quite a success, even if Rust vanishes tomorrow.