This is something I've been thinking about lately. I do think memory safety is an important trait that rust has over c and other languages with manual memory management. However, I think Rust also has other attractive features that those older languages don't have:
* a very nice package manager
* Libraries written in it tend to be more modular and composable.
* You can more confidently compile projects without worrying too much about system differences or dependencies.
I think this is because:
* It came out during the Internet era.
* It's partially to do with how cargo by default encourages more use of existing libraries rather than reinventing the wheel or using custom/vendored forks of them.
* It doesn't have dynamic linking unless you use FFI. So rust can still run into issues here but only when depending on non-rust libraries.
* a very nice package manager
* Libraries written in it tend to be more modular and composable.
* You can more confidently compile projects without worrying too much about system differences or dependencies.
I think this is because:
* It came out during the Internet era.
* It's partially to do with how cargo by default encourages more use of existing libraries rather than reinventing the wheel or using custom/vendored forks of them.
* It doesn't have dynamic linking unless you use FFI. So rust can still run into issues here but only when depending on non-rust libraries.