The author wonders why Rust is getting attention in 2015, despite lacking GC. The answer is concurrency, a much more difficult problem than avoiding null ptr derefs. C++ advocates are right to say that with Boost libs and C++ 11 and 14 it's much easier to avoid mem mgmt problems. Concurrency remains hard, and Rust's borrow mechanism is the biggest step forward since the late 90s IMHO.