So what exactly is the "much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out" of Rust? If I'm understanding the post right, that language still has references, lifetimes, traits, enums, etc., because all of those features cohere; you can't remove just one and expect the rest of the language to still work. Once you grant all those features, your language isn't much smaller or cleaner than Rust; your language pretty much is Rust.

The last section gives two different hints as to what this "smaller and cleaner" language might be, but neither of them fully makes sense to me.

First, withoutboats's "Notes on a smaller Rust". That post and especially its sequel are great and I like them a lot, but the title is fairly misleading as to what they're getting at. The language that boats sketches out in those posts has significantly different design goals from Rust; in particular, it abandons the requirement of low-level programmer control over runtime behavior, and so is unsuitable for many use cases that Rust is used for. The idea, rather, is to explore what lessons Rust can offer for the design of a language with more "mainstream" requirements (i.e., one that can afford things like a tracing garbage collector, and wants to avoid Rust's downsides compared to other popular languages, like slow compile times and heavy syntactic salt). That language is not "struggling to get out" of Rust; Rust doesn't want to be it.

Second, "In a manner of speaking, that smaller Rust is the language I fell in love with when I first learned it in 2018. Rust is a lot bigger today, in many ways, and the smaller Rust is just a nostalgic rose-tinted memory." I've explained above why I don't think boats's proposed "smaller Rust" is anything like the real Rust was at any point in its history (at least after the very early days, once the designers figured out that they were targeting C++'s niche). In most fundamental respects, Rust hasn't changed that much since 2018, and a lot of the changes (like the new editions) are about making it more syntactically flexible and increasing the fraction of sensical programs that compile. That said, there are two big exceptions: async and const, which were much more minimal in 2018 and have since expanded to big complex meta-features with many interlocking parts that weren't part of the language's original core. If the claim is specifically that Rust was smaller and cleaner before async and const, then by all means, say that! But the post doesn't, leaving us to try to figure out what was meant.