Robert Krahn

Hi Mickey, ah no -- you've done WAY more than me in this area! I had been meaning to try your combobulate package. FWIW: after 20 years of Emacs I personally switched to VSCode a couple of years ago because I felt that in Emacs I was missing out on the LSP experience that VSCode provided in Rust, Typescript, Scala, etc. (I was using Eglot). In any case, there's a very nice Emacs emulation mode in VSCode https://github.com/whitphx/vscode-emacs-mcx which includes some paredit functionality courtesy of https://robert.kra.hn/past-projects/paredit-js.html and I'm working on porting my favorite paredit function, paredit-kill. Unfortunately that's the one where the paredit author left this comment in the code: ;;; Please do not try to understand this code unless you have a VERY ;;; good reason to do so. I gave up trying to figure it out well ;;; enough to explain it, long ago.

I love using Rust in my toy projects (and wish my job was more open to anything but C++, but oh well). With its functional-style iterators, sum types and pattern matching, Rust lets me write code in a way that just feels natural. And the borrow checker stopped bothering me once I embraced reference-counted pointers for those cases where lifetimes are not obvious. Compilation time also hasn't been much of an issue once I moved to using dylibs for dependencies [1]. So if you want to use Rust but are wary of those problems, don't be! :) With that said, I can't help but feel that Rust development has noticeably slowed down over the years. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the hard work behind each release! It's just that, from my totally uninformed bystander perspective, there's been a sharp drop in people working on the language and compiler full-time since around Mozilla layoffs, and Rust still hasn't recovered from that. It's surprising and quite disappointing to see no significant manpower commitment from other corporations using Rust, like Microsoft [2] and Google [3]. As a result, while there's definitely new exciting things happening, more and more issues are piling up, many sitting unaddressed for years. Granted, it's mostly the small things that you can live without, but they all add up. Here are some examples just off the top of my head: 1. If-let chains [4] and if-let guards [5], proposed back in 2018, are still not there. I constantly encounter cases where having…

Rust supports dynamic linking btw. https://robert.kra.hn/posts/2022-09-09-speeding-up-incremental-rust-co… https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2024/08/27/rust-dylib-rabbit-ho…

My project CodeChisel3D has a similar goal: http://robert.kra.hn/projects/live-programming-with-three-and-webvr