Great post, and I absolutely agree. IMO we have something of a problem community-wise in Rust in that we’re perhaps more than a little bit inclined to overrate a variety of things that are certainly commendable but at the same time in no way groundbreaking.
For example, Rust’s cross-platform support, while quite good, is nothing to write home about. There are other languages that aren’t C, don’t run in a virtual machine, and are not garbage collected out there that can run in and target quite a few more places while not even using LLVM at all.
KillerCup recently asked in their “Rust 2019” blog post “Did you think about the emergence of an idiomatic GUI library?” and the answer is yes, I have, many times!
Unfortunately, as I think this thread on the Rust user forums as well as this one here on Rust Internals shows, there are a lot of people in the community who have what is in my view a perspective of “nobody has ever done [some thing] specifically in [C++] and this means that it is therefore a dead-end not ever worth considering.”
(The “some thing” being in the contexts of the two threads I linked, the mere idea of an universal GUI abstraction that works the same way everywhere.)
To be blunt that kind of thinking is just a HUGE mistake with an actively detrimental effect on various surrounding things, IMO.
Why do we care at all about what anyone has not done in C++ (or other languages depending on the topic) previously? Why can’t we start thinking on a more broad scale and start just doing stuff for no reason other than we think it is worth doing?