The Rust language design team said that ‘flattening the learning curve’ could involve compiler improvements, improving async support, or extending the language or type system. Credit: Gratisography With the Rust roadmap for 2024, the developers behind the popular language for fast and safe system-level development are focused on flattening the learning curve as well as on helping users help each other and scaling the Rust project overall. Unveiled April 4, the Rust 2024 roadmap is offered as a starting point, with the Rust language design team committed to revisiting themes as 2023 approaches. Under the theme of flattening the learning curve, the intent is to eliminate many patterns and idiosyncrasies needed to learn Rust. Async and embedded Rust are particular areas of interest. The Rust developers stressed, though, that Rust already has become easier to use in recent years. Specific goals for further improvement include boosting async support and making the compiler better able to recognize when code is correct by improving the type checker and other areas. Other possibilities include extending the language or type system so that developers can more directly express what they want code to do. To help users help each other, plans call for empowering library authors to better serve users, either by helping to manage the feature lifecycle or by expanding library capabilities. Experimentation in the library ecosystem is encouraged. To help the Rust project scale, a system is needed that makes it easy to discover what is going on and how users can help. The Rust team wants to scale language development through delegation, empowering developers to own and drive the work they are passionate about. Rust 1.0, the language team noted in a blog post, was released in 2015. Since then, the Rust language has grown to be a mainstay of major tech companies. For Rust 2024, the goal is to increase the “empowerment” of Rust developers in a number of different ways. RustProgramming LanguagesSoftware Development