I hadn’t really looked at rust in the last few years. It’s come a long way. It feels more ergonomic than I remember, and the compilation time seems much improved.

I’m not sure if it’s just that I’m on faster hardware, and I’m more used to some of the concepts, or if it really has markedly improved.

The compiler has gotten faster over the years; don't forget that rustup makes it easy to try out older compilers; if your code would have compiled on Rust 1.0, you can

$ rustup install 1.0.0

$ cargo +1.0.0 run

to give it a shot!