> But it has one fundamental problem, which the entire community refuses to address: the steep entry.
Do you have any evidence for this? From what I’ve seen, the Rust community has invested considerably in creating learning resources and so forth to make getting started easier. However there’s only a finite amount of time/people working on it, so rough edges remain for less common use cases
Two major ones: first one is the obvious - I don't see a whole lot of effort to make the first steps easier. Second one is I brought this topic on several occasions in the rust community, the closes I got to a sensible(note the word closest) answer was "well you could package development environments for different hardware inside docker containers". Which for better or worse gives all the credibility one might want to this[1] comment.
Rust doesn't have a volatile memcpy yet, bitfield ergonomics are poor, global variables require thread safety even when targeting a single core device, the memory model isn't finished, and upholding the rules the compiler expects you to respect in unsafe code with regard to aliasing is difficult to wrap your head around (pointer provenance, even the author of tokio got it wrong).
Do you have any evidence for this? From what I’ve seen, the Rust community has invested considerably in creating learning resources and so forth to make getting started easier. However there’s only a finite amount of time/people working on it, so rough edges remain for less common use cases