But isn't it worth spending a few years poking around before we lock ourselves into fifty more years of bad ergonomics, now that things have clearly reached the point where there's credible motion towards a C alternative?
Rust's lifetimes have a steep (un)learning curve, but once you know what you're doing, they're fine. Really. IMHO Rust has ergonomic problems around effects or generic numeric code, but not memory management.
AFAIK no silver bullet has been discovered yet that would be an improvement over Rust that doesn't have some other trade-off. Val's mutable value semantics is more local and limited. It "solves" the problem of ugly lifetime annotations by not supporting complex zero-cost lifetimes at all. That doesn't mean Val can't be successful — it can be easier to use by supporting simpler constructs and focusing less on zero-cost abstractions, like Swift, but its ideas aren't stop-the-presses for Rust.
We're already overdue for having a more modern, practical replacement for C. Waiting for a hypothetical better-than-Rust language will only mean staying with C for even longer.
