Simplicity is definitely a goal. These days, not a day goes by on the Rust team in which we don't discuss ways to simplify the language.
My colleague Dave Herman always says that language design goes through cycles: You identify a problem, add solutions to fix it, then discover that these solutions are best merged with some other ideas. The result is that, as a language evolves, complexity goes up and down. I think that we're coming off a peak of complexity and the language is going to evolve toward simplicity in the near term.
Just to name a few simple examples, removing the alias analysis pass and removing "native modules" are some simplifications that mostly have consensus at this point.
My colleague Dave Herman always says that language design goes through cycles: You identify a problem, add solutions to fix it, then discover that these solutions are best merged with some other ideas. The result is that, as a language evolves, complexity goes up and down. I think that we're coming off a peak of complexity and the language is going to evolve toward simplicity in the near term.
Just to name a few simple examples, removing the alias analysis pass and removing "native modules" are some simplifications that mostly have consensus at this point.