alt Hacker NewsYears ago, when I initially picked up Rust, I loved it. It does a lot of things right. At the same time, though, I knew there was a possibility of it going wrong in two opposite directions:
1. Developers balked at being required to take on the cognitive load required to allow GC-less memory management
2. Developers wore their ability to take on that cognitive load as a badge of honor, despite it not being in their best interest
I eventually came to the decision to stop developing in Rust, despite its popularity. It is really cool that its creators pulled it off. It was quite an achievement, given how different it was when it came out. I think that if I had to implement a critical library I would consider using Rust for it, but as a general programming language I want something that allows me to focus my mental facilities on the complexities of the actual problem domain, and I felt that it was too often too difficult to do that with Rust.
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Rust does not require GC-less memory management. It supports reference counting out of the box, and reference counting is a kind of GC. It's not inherently any harder to use than Swift (another memory-safe language) which plenty of average developers use to code for Apple platforms.
It's not quite a fully formed argument, but I'm coming to the view that Rust mostly requires less cognitive load than other languages. I'm coming at this from the perspective of "cognitive load" meaning, roughly "the measure of the number of things you need to keep in working memory". Rust is no doubt difficult to learn, there are many concepts and a lot of syntax, but when you grasp it cognitive load is actually lower. Rust encodes so much more about the program in text than peer languages so there are fewer things to keep in your head. One good example of this is pointer lifetimes in Zig and C which you have to keep in your head, whereas in Rust you don't.
My own appreciation for Rust is rooted in humility. I know I'm an overgrown monkey prone to all kinds of mistakes. I appreciate Rust for helping me avoid that side of me