> However, I am not convinced one can make something solving all the things Rust solves which is substantially simpler as language.

I wonder a lot about this too. As far as I know, rust is alone. It’s the first language to exist which does compile time memory management in a safe way. Every other language either is memory-unsafe (C, Zig) or garbage collected. (Go, JS, etc).

Rust might the first language of its kind, but it probably won’t be the last. I’d be very surprised if we’re still using rust 100 years from now. Subsequent languages can learn from rust’s accidental complexity and clean up the approach.

Personally I suspect it’s possible to have a borrow checked language that’s much simpler than rust. I don’t know what that would look like, but it would be surprising to me if we found the best programming language in this space on our (collective) first attempt at it.

But I don’t have enough insight to figure out what rust’s successor would look like either. But luckily for both of us, there are a lot of smart people thinking about the problem now. Let’s give it a decade and see.