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wow, I never contemplated before whether that kind of language design could be evil, but you make me think it might be. Maybe not in the ordinary course of sensible use, but in some horrible "I didn't think of that". Then I feel a bit hypocritical because I'm sure I've relied on a hundred more problematic abstractions without worrying about it.

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Far from evil, it's amazingly useful, and is why things like `let x: Vec<_> = foo.collect();` work (the return type of the `collect` method is generic). Rust stops type inference at function boundaries, so the precise type of something is never far away if you need it.

I concur. Rust does it very sensible and elegantly. I will note that the other thing rust does is let you under specify the lifetimes of a function signature but when compile errors happen they tell you what they ended up inferring and you can always correct it when you need something slightly different. The two features are critical in making Rust code easy to read and write as the types and lifetimes can get tedious and most of you have to specify it literally everywhere.

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