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> Rust hasn't gotten any major new language feature in the last 6 years. Most language improvement is improving orthogonality of existing features.

Rust also ships with a functioning epoch/edition system that makes it feasible to rework existing language features for improved generality, elegance etc. without losing backward compatibility. I'm not sure if Scala has anything like that.

Also, the nightly/stable split in Rust means that most new features don't reach the final adoption stage unless there's a very real consensus about their design. A lot of effort is made to get rid of incidental complexity wherever feasible, before the new features are actually stabilized.

Most language implementations that "haven't gotten any major new language feature in the last 6 years" would be described as broadly stagnant or stale, but Rust is quite different.

>Rust has had 10x better tooling right from the start. Cargo vs SBT, no joke.

Cargo is a really good tool, but I wouldn't say it is 10x better than SBT.On the other hand, Scala can be used with different build tools: Maven, Gradle, Mill. With Rust you have no choice(or I'm not aware of). Rust-analyzer is better than metals, can't argue with that...

>Rust has improved its compiler performance by >3x in the last 5 years

Rust compiler is very slow. I can't imagine what compilation time was 5 years ago, but even now, it is incredibly slow, even compared to "slow" Scala compiler(which is no longer true). I'm working on a little project with bevy, and even on such small project compilation time sucks. You can't compare it with Scala, it's just completely different experience.

>Rust hasn't gotten any major new language feature in the last 6 years.

That's not true. Rust team handles these changes correctly. Rust has concept of "Editions", and every 3 years new edition introduces significant changes. I really like how editions work, it's a great way to maintain backwards compat.

>4 Mostly agree

>5 Fully agree

>It's easier and more performant to call C from Rust than to call C from Scala.

Yep, but it's not Scala but the JVM limitation. JNI sucks, but there is an effort to improve that (project Panama).

Overall, both Scala and Rust are great languages. Rust team has addressed many typical issues from the beginning. Scala had its mistakes, but moving in the right direction.

I need to hash something, one way or another, in virtually 100% of my projects. Where is SHA-256 in the standard library?

cargo add sha256

Rust standard library is minimalist (at least compared to Java/.NET), so no SHA-266.

If you want a more useful standard library, perhaps consider Go.

It is minimalist because it has to support many platforms and must be lightweight and easy to port. It also must be stable for a long time. Once something lands in the standard library, it is very hard to remove / modify / redesign. How many half-broken date time implementations Java ended up with?

But it makes up for the minimalist stdlib by making it a breeze to use third-party libraries.

There is no sha-256 in the C or C++ standard library either. A cryptographic hashing algorithm like sha-256 is not something that necessarily has to be in a standard library.

There's plenty of old modules in the Python standard library that hardly any one uses. But removing them would break backwards compatibility guarantees. The Rust project has decided that they want to keep the standard library lean. And this works well in practise, because cargo is a really good package manager.