Fortunately it appears this perfectly legitimate comment has been salvaged. Steve, I was disappointed that this topic[1] received no discussion at all at HN. Has anyone inside Mozilla looked at it? The title is a bit click-baity for academic work, in my opinion, but I do think the points raised are worthy. Much like recent criticism of PostgreSQL by Uber, one hopes the purveyors of Rust are also open and respond well to constructive criticism.
It wasn't discussed a lot because it's quite old, and we talked about it a lot when it was published. I actually met (and then became friends with) Amit in real life because of this paper; we're both in New York and got coffee to discuss it.
(It's been a while, but IIRC the issues they had were more about not understanding what exacty was available and how to use them, at the time. The project has been going really well since then; Amit has been giving a number of cool talks about it at various Rust user groups, and they recently started their own "This week in", though it's called "Talking Tock" because that's a better name, ha!)
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12258957