OK. I mean, personally I would swallow a lot of ugly special cases before adding macros, but it's certainly in line with other people's aesthetic preferences and Rust's "C++ spirit" of a low-level language with high-level language features. I can see the logic in saying that since we need lots of fancy mechanisms for sound safety anyway, what's one more gonna hurt?
BTW, Zig manages to do both things without macros and without any special cases in the compiler. TBF, Zig's approach was unfamiliar to me until I saw it in Zig, and it is Zig's "brilliant idea" (even if it had originated elsewhere), so it's OK if Rust simply didn't consider it; Rust certainly has its own brilliant idea.
BTW, Zig manages to do both things without macros and without any special cases in the compiler. TBF, Zig's approach was unfamiliar to me until I saw it in Zig, and it is Zig's "brilliant idea" (even if it had originated elsewhere), so it's OK if Rust simply didn't consider it; Rust certainly has its own brilliant idea.