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Ecosystem really is the whole problem, though. You can never make it big without having lots of friends. Rust is a pretty cool language, but I can't help being reminded about another very well-designed but ultimately unsuccessful C++ challenger, D. The parallels are really hard to ignore. D, like Rust, had great syntax and was a breath of fresh air after coding with C++98. Neither Rust not D has a sponsor with really…
There are important differences: D threw away one of the most important features of C/C++ (for the target audience): usability of the language without a garbage collector. Also, Mozilla has much deeper pockets than Digital Mars. Still I agree with you that it is very likely that Rust will follow a parabolic trajectory. The advantages as perceived by the industry compared with C++11/14 will be too few. At the same tim…
Rust is memory- and type-safe (as in: the compiler will not let you write a dangling reference, invalidate an iterator, or write exception-unsafe code without opting into an unsafe dialect). The security benefits alone of that are enough to justify the language for our use cases, and, from what we've seen, for many others. Safe zero-cost abstractions are a niche to its own.