August 3, 2026
Drop dead drama
Rust project goals: Immobile types and guaranteed destructors
Rust wants to stop code from “slipping away,” and the comments are already fighting
TLDR: Rust approved a plan to let some data stay fixed in place and force cleanup to happen, a change aimed at making tricky code patterns safer and easier. Commenters are split between **“finally, this fixes a huge flaw”** and **“here we go, another complicated retrofit,”** with bonus arguing over whether cleanup can ever truly be guaranteed.
Rust, the programming language famous for being extremely strict, just approved a big plan for 2026–2027: let some kinds of data refuse to be shuffled around in memory or quietly thrown away. In plain English, the project wants certain values to stay put and guarantee cleanup happens instead of letting programmers accidentally—or "accidentally"—skip it. That could unlock safer background tasks, easier cleanup, and fewer of the weird workarounds developers currently use.
But the real fireworks are in the replies. One confused commenter basically became the audience surrogate, asking what any of this actually means for normal people who haven’t spent their lives inside async Rust. That opened the door for the split-screen drama: one camp called this a long-overdue fix for a giant hole in the language, cheering that Rust may finally replace what one person bluntly called the "Pin hack". Another camp instantly got suspicious, with one hot take groaning that this looks like "more algebraic effects being retrofitted onto Rust"—the kind of phrase that guarantees a comment section spiral.
Then came the classic Rust brain-bender: if you can still leak memory through reference cycles, can the language really promise cleanup? That question turned the thread into a mini detective show about loopholes, safety, and whether this is a breakthrough or just a prettier rulebook. And for the ultra-nerds, there was even excitement over side mentions of so-called “linear types,” which is the kind of bonus lore that makes language-design fans lose a weekend on Zulip.
Key Points
- •Rust accepted a 2026–2027 project goal to add explicit type capabilities for movement, destruction, and forgetting.
- •The proposal introduces new auto-traits such as `Move`, `Destruct`, and `Forget`, allowing types to opt out of being moved or forgotten.
- •A major motivation is to support immobile, self-referential async types more directly than the current `Pin` model.
- •Another motivation is enabling guaranteed destructors for types that must run cleanup logic, such as scoped task handles.
- •Planned work includes compiler MVPs, RFCs, and validation in Rust for Linux and the Linux kernel ecosystem.