> I think "practically rudderless" here is fairly misinformed and a little harmful/rude to all the folks doing tons of great work still.
That great work is mostly opaque on the outside.
What's been noticeable as an observer is that a lot of the well known names associated with rust no longer work on it and there's been a large amount of turnover around it.
That manifests in things like this case where work was in progress up until ~2021 and then was ultimately backburnered while the entire org was reshuffled. (I'd note the dates on the MCP as Feb 2024).
I can't tell exactly how much work or what direction it went in from 2021 to 2024 but it does look apparent that the work ultimately got shifted between multiple individuals.
I hope rust is in a better spot. But I also don't think I was being unfair in pointing out how much momentum got wrecked when Mozilla pulled support.
The language team tends to look at these kinds of challenges and drive them to a root cause, which spins off a tree of work to adjust the core language to support what's required by the higher level pieces, once that work is done then the higher level projects are unblocked (example: RPIT for async drop).
That's not always super visible if you're not following the working groups or in contact with folks working on the stuff. It's entirely fair that they're prioritizing getting work done than explaining low level language challenges to everyone everywhere.
I think you're seeing a lack of data and trying to use that as a justification to fit a story that you like, more than seeing data that is derivative of the story that you like. Of course some people were horribly disrupted by the changes, but language usage also expanded substantially during and since that time, and there are many team members employed by many other organizations, and many independents too.
And there are more docs, anyway:
https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2024h2/async.... https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2025h1/async.... https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2025h2/field-... https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2025h2/evolvi... https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2025h2/goals....