I have tried Rust in the past, though not on this particular hobby project (my Clojure interpreter). I found it hard to get into, and I've gotten into a lot of languages in my time-- some of which are considered challenging (e.g. Haskell). With Rust, I always felt I spent too much time wrestling with it, and not enough time being productive. I imagine that you hit a threshold at some point and that begins to change. But for my side projects, that bar wasn't worth jumping.
Inferring lifetimes from the implementation of a function won't happen for the same reason that inferring types won't happen: it is really nice for the signature of a function to not automatically be changed if the body is changed, instead programmers should be told when they might be breaking their users.
However, the compiler could (and did, I believe) run inference and suggest a fix that the programmer can explicitly include.
Rust's documentation is very well written. The authors have put in great effort to make things clear.
Granted Rust has some paradigms and constructs which are not easy to learn, I found it rather exciting. I think it has future scope.
Wonder whats happening with Redox. I hope Rust adds more libraries, especially network related, since the networked world is increasingly looking like a distributed OS of sort. Browsers are looking like an OS or a shell inside the OS. Browsers are getting more complex with more functionalities added every few months. Not sure I expressed my thoughts correctly, but I guess one can understand what I mean.
Rust should move away from C standard library, if possible.
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