Well, isn´t that a bit damning though? I am not an expert on Rust, so please enlighten me. If it is meant to replace C++, I would expect it to dethrone on the areas where it is king. I am looking at a crap ton of programs with an UI. Your IDE, your text editor, your spreadsheet program, your graphics editor, etc. Most of the modern programs just give up and ship as a full blown bloated memory eating web browser.
There is a gap between the nineties and now, and it is still void.
If you have to constrain it to CLI apps the average developer here on HN needs to write, I don´t see a reason to use such a complex beast as Rust. If you mean operating systems, I can see a spot for Rust. Also database systems or a web server implementation. But that is fairly niche.
For userland cli-apps I am not sure if the added complexity pays of in terms of sufficient performance gains in practice. If you want to write a new implementation of grep, sure. But how niche is that?
So in those cases where you need both type strictness (which I agree should be the default requirement) and cannot have an automatic garbage collector, I can see the value of Rust.
But for what audience is an automatic GC really a problem? Personally I would use Haskell, Java, F# for CLI-apps, but I know there are tons of other options there.