Of course I welcome removal of GC syntax, but I am getting in doubt on when Rust language specification can be stabilized. Version 0.9 seems it must be stable now, but they're still putting big changes on the language.
More seriously, look at the release rate. It's pretty frequent. There's clearly heaps of work going on. It's not a moribund project.
Making a safe programming language that doesn't require GC or a runtime (while allowing allocation) has literally never been done before in industry. It has taken time to get something usable. The current overall design seems pretty workable now, as evidenced by all the projects people are starting to write, so I think it's basically just a matter of finishing off rough edges at this point.
Kinda curious on the do N.times -> for foo in range(0, N) changes. I thought I remember a recent post from you about that. Any reason for the switch? (I ask as someone thats used ruby too much myself and is currently switching cold turkey to plain old C while rust gets a bit more mature)