Many of the features of such crates are making their way to the standard library, so things will definitely improve. Figuring out what is best has taken some time and Rust has not wanted to prematurely commit.
If anyone's interested in helping to shape the future of Rust's built-in error-handling story, there's an error handling project group that's been doing great work recently, e.g. the major effort to move the Error trait into libcore ( https://github.com/rust-lang/project-error-handling/issues/3 ) and stabilizing std::backtrace. You can follow along or get involved via the #project-error-handling channel on the Rust zulip: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/
I like what the error handling achieves, it is actually readable way to understand the divergent control flow paths (and probably majority of code is read more than written), but I do not enjoy writing the initial boilerplate, so that's good to hear.
No, they're not. GATs are used internally in the compiler to implement async methods, but there is absolutely no need for them to be in the language for that (just like generators are used to implement await but are not part of the (stable) language). GATs may or may not be useful, but IMO the actual real-world use cases are pretty weak.
Yes, I've read the stabilization thread and I'm aware of your stance. :P Whether or not it's exposed, the mechanism still needs to exist in the compiler, and enough library authors are clamoring to use it that I think the argument in favor of exposing them is stronger than you're giving it credit for.
You mention generators, but a lot of people are clamoring for those as well, and I fully expect them to be exposed to end-users someday.
My point is that there or may or may not be reasonable justification for adding GATs, reasonable people can disagree on that. But async methods are not part of that justification. Similarly, generators may or may not be good for the language (IMO they would be good to add, if they can be made to work etc.) but they didn't need to be part of the language to add await.
Even if the use cases outside the standard library were weak, given that the work needs to be done anyway for the standard library, why wouldn't you expose them?
To be clear, there are not use cases in the std lib. The use case is as an intermediate representation for the compiler, and that is no motivation for inclusion in the language (in the same way that we don't have vtables or register allocation in the surface syntax)
Being able to have a generic "Mappable" trait seems like a good use case for the standard library. It's something I've wanted in the past, and was disappointed that it didn't exist.
We'd like anyone who is interested in Rust to fill out the survey, even if you've stopped using Rust or have never used Rust (and of course if you're a Rust user, however much or little you use it).
I'm sorry you've had that experience. We are working hard to be better open source citizens in many ways, including better communication on issues, etc.
This should work (it's my goto test case). You have to put the cursor in the erroring code to see the possible fix icon in the margin. If you don't see it please file an issue with the project you're trying this in and I'll investigate.
Syntax highlighting is (usually) done by the editor, not the server in the LS protocol. The changes sent from editor to server are pretty minimal, and so the whole thing is pretty quick. The overhead, never caused us any problems.
Thanks, I totally missed that. That's pretty great – I thought it was a neat idea from MS, but I was worried it would get any traction. Glad to have been wrong!
