Wonderful question! We have a community effort going on now called the Libz Blitz , which is trying to make it easy for people to start contributing to significant projects and get them to reach a 1.0 stability.

Is Rust used in any of geospatial operations? Also not my area, but I do know there are a number of geospatial libraries in crates.io .

There's RustGnuplot , but I've never tried using it. I know the scientific community is really into Python these days, so another option to use pyo3 , rust-cpython , or rust-numpy to use Python tools to explore Rust objects.

Oh, and Macros 2.0. I love doing stupid things with compiler plugins (like stateful , a failed attempt to make a compiler plugin for coroutines). It's going to be so much fun when we have the ability to transform Stable Rust AST.

I’m really excited for coroutines , not just for async-await, but for a simple way to define complex state machines. I’ve done some preliminary experiments and I’m pretty sure we could speed up serde deserialization maybe 10-20% by using coroutines for even more optimal buffering. Non-lexical lifetimes would be nice too. It's not that hard to work around lexical lifetimes, but it'd be nice to avoid that papercut. It is however one of the big complaints I hear from new Rust developers.

Another great security project that's starting to integrate Rust is Tor . They talk about the branch here .

No plans now. One of our driving philosophies is that we truly want the language and the standard library to be stable in order to make it easy for users to upgrade when we release every 6 weeks (known as the train model ). The consequence of this is that we are promising to support that anything added to the standard library. If we followed Python's "batteries included" philosophy, those libraries would be quick to atrophy as we learn better ways to implement things. So instead we developed Cargo to make it as easy as possible to depend on external resources. There are a few projects trying to make GUIs easy to use with Rust, which you can see on Awesome Rust . I believe the most advanced integration is with GTK , but I don't have much experience in this space, so I could be wrong.

I miss two things from the old days. First, we used to have an anonymous record syntax, where you could just write let point = {x: 1, y: 2}; (I think that was the to define a point without having to declare the type. We then could write json serializers that would transparently render that record out into a json object. Second, sometimes I miss our old closure syntax, which we stole from Ruby. We could write let x = array.map |item| { item + 1 } . It would have made it easier to have pseudo-control flow methods.

I'm sadly not in NYC, but I do run the San Francisco meetup (where we are hosting a meetup tonight with a live stream if you are not local). If anyone is interested in attending (or speaking) at a meetup and you're not in NYC of San Francisco, we have 89 known meetups around the world . Feel free to contact them, or or open a ticket on our community talks repository and we'll help connect you with the local groups.

I haven't tried it either, but if you want to compare Gotham with the other web frameworks, check out rust-web-framework-comparison , which re-implements a simple Hello World service in the various frameworks.