> 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.

I think there's an argument to be made that you could in fact make a simpler language than Rust while keeping the core concept. This variant of the language would remove:

- the Copy trait

- reborrowing

- deref coercion

- automagic insertion of `into_iter` in loops

- automatic call to drop at the end of scope (instead you'd have to call it by yourself or get an compiler error)

- trait bounds having an automatic `:Sized` bound by default.

- lifetime elision

- no “match ergonomics”

- and likely a few other pieces of “magic” that can be hard for beginner to grasp, but that's what I had at the top of my head.

This language would be much simpler, by having fewer concepts and a lot less “magic”, but it would also be much more cumbersome to use in a day to day basis, as all of the above are clever workaround designed to make common tasks as straightforward as possible, and I don't think anyone would prefer to use it than using Rust itself. It may be useful as an instructional tool when introducing Rust to students though.