I think it's actually easier, thanks to Cargo and the Crates ecosystem. Some of the hardest things for students are just building and linking code, especially third party libraries.
I run two intermediate programming courses, one where we teach C++, and another where we teach Rust. In the Rust course, by the first week they are writing code and using 3rd party libraries; whereas in the C course we spend a lot of time dealing with linker errors, include errors, segfaults, etc. The learning curve for C/C++ gets steep very fast. But with Rust it's actually quite flat until you have to get into borrowing, and you can even defer that understanding with clone().
By the end of the semester in the C++ course, students' final project is a file server, they can get there in 14 weeks.
In Rust the final project is a server that implements LSP, which also includes an interpreter for a language they design. The submissions for this project are usually much more robust than the submissions for the C++ course, and I would attribute this difference to the designs of the languages.
I run two intermediate programming courses, one where we teach C++, and another where we teach Rust. In the Rust course, by the first week they are writing code and using 3rd party libraries; whereas in the C course we spend a lot of time dealing with linker errors, include errors, segfaults, etc. The learning curve for C/C++ gets steep very fast. But with Rust it's actually quite flat until you have to get into borrowing, and you can even defer that understanding with clone().
By the end of the semester in the C++ course, students' final project is a file server, they can get there in 14 weeks.
In Rust the final project is a server that implements LSP, which also includes an interpreter for a language they design. The submissions for this project are usually much more robust than the submissions for the C++ course, and I would attribute this difference to the designs of the languages.