The Registers of Rust

BRANK

It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of the directions the project has taken, which has often occupied my thoughts. From that preoccupation this blog post has emerged, hopefully the first in a series over the next few weeks outlining my thoughts on the design of Rust in 2023, especially in connection to async, and I hope its impact will be chiefly positive.One vision of the design of Rust I held that I tried to express to others before I stopped working on it, but seem to have failed to evangelize well enough, is that a coherent but incomplete design around control-flow effects has somewhat naturally emerged. This is not a general “effect system” but is specifically a pattern of language and library suppo…