Rust has a number of features (ergonomic and technical) and some really nice language design that permits writing quite “high-level” code. Personally, having a compiler and type system as powerful as Rusts makes it worthwhile alone.
This. Rust is quite pleasant to use and once some barriers are overcome quite productive. Not Python fast dev speed, but easily Go levels of productive for me. I rarely fight the borrow checker unless building tricky data structures. It will still stump me once in a while with lifetimes, but the trade off is so worth it to have memory safety guarantees and know there are no foot guns like C code would have. And if you are just cranking something out you can write code a little less idiomatically and of efficiently for quick scripts or smaller throwaway CLI tools. Rust prefers a more functional style but you can just as easily make it not so.
It's nowhere as ergonomic, for the general population, as the likes of Python. References alone add a level of bothersomeness to the language that dramatically restricts its appeal.
Rust has a great role to play, replacing C and C++ in all performance-critical and security-critical underpinnings of modern computation (from kernels to UI toolkits). But higher up the stack, where those concerns are outweighed by overall development costs, other languages will continue to rule; and if one's focus is there, learning Rust is probably a waste of time.
> higher up the stack, where those concerns are outweighed by overall development costs, other languages will continue to rule;
Eh, I've written and maintained data pipelines, and API layers for downstream teams in prod in Rust, and it was a much more pleasant and low-effort experience than either doing either in Python. I could have had a "complete program" written first in Python, sure, but that gain in velocity is rapidly overtaken by the hours spent debugging and fixing issues in prod, issues that in Rust, I've not typically had.
> if one's focus is there, learning Rust is probably a waste of time.
au contraire - I genuinely think that learning languages, especially ones that are _not_ similar to your day-to-day language is an incredibly valuable thing to do. Learn a Lisp, learn some Haskell, etc, it exposes you to ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise come across, and gives you extra skills and tools with which to solve problems better. Maybe not all those tools are always applicable, but when they are it's a force-multiplier.
You're not wrong. Ocaml, Haskell, etc are pretty slept on, and have some amazing features, and I 100% think people should be more open to using them.
In my space (data engineering and associated systems), Rust is a much more palatable and easier sell than an Ocaml or a Haskell.
> With faster compiler toolchains and REPL like tooling.
TBH I don't really miss a REPL, I know a lot of people love it, but between the type system, tooling like RA, and how Rust makes writing tests _so_ frictionless, I've not really had any need to touch a REPL in the last ~2 years. I've probably been abusing the frictionless test functionality to write little snippets to test out using a new library or tool, I certainly find it a lot manual work than the "type multi-line snippet into repl. Make a typo. Start it all over again. Discover that part x actually wants a y. Write it all over again. Repeat until correct. Painstaking trawl through repl history to find the set of code that actually does what we want and lift it into our actual code base" experience I have with reps-based development.
