The most important feature of a tool meant to support creativity is interactivity. Last time I checked, Rust didn't have a REPL, didn't support live-patching, and didn't have fast compile times - all features critical for interactivity. Has something changed since then?
Also, while cold compile times can be very slow of you have a lot of dependencies with macros etc, incremental compile time is often very fast. Rust has one of the most advanced incremental compilers out there. So for experimenting, tweaking and updating code, that's not going to have a long cycle.
Does this REPL support all of the features that traditional, batch-processed Rust does? Last time I checked, I found "REPLs" for Rust that were hacks, just putting code into a file and re-compiling and re-running the whole thing - didn't support all of the features and super slow.
> incremental compile time is often very fast
I tried Rust a few years ago and got incremental compile times in the tens of seconds for medium-sized projects, which is excruciatingly slow. Unless compile times are sub-second, it's not fast enough, unless the REPL is somehow faster.
> The most important feature of a tool meant to support creativity is interactivity.
This seems like a requirement you personally came up with that does not mesh with reality. Throughout history the greatest creative achievement have been made using absurdly difficult to use non-interactive mediums.
Also Rust compile times are not as slow as you imagine them to be.
> This seems like a requirement you personally came up with that does not mesh with reality.
No, it's actually pretty obvious, if you actually take a moment to think about it. Creativity is about making things in reality, which necessitates the construction of new things, which means that you either need to keep design details entirely in your head while you work (which is infeasible for many things and challenging for most things) or you need to work with a medium (paint, clay, code) as you create, which means that the medium (and tool) need to be interactive.
> Throughout history the greatest creative achievement have been made using absurdly difficult to use non-interactive mediums.
This is completely absurd. Most, if not all, of the classical arts have used highly interactive media. Painting? Interactive medium. Sculping? Interactive. Mechanical devices, like the steam engine and the plane? Interactive. In almost every single creative field, you get the opportunity to work with things incrementally.
Unfortunately, for historical reasons (namely their C lineage), most languages are non-interactive batch-processed monstrosities which inhibit creativity, and Rust is no exception.
> Also Rust compile times are not as slow as you imagine them to be.
I've used Rust, and the compile times are exactly what I remember them to be - tens of minutes for large programs, and tens of seconds for incremental compiles, which is tens of seconds too long.
