> I wonder how this would fare with students who have a clean slate.
I suspect that the % of students who have difficulties won't be much different, overall. There may be a different distribution of when they run into trouble.
The interesting question is whether the group of students who have problems with other first programming languages is different from the group that have problems with Rust-as-a-first-language...
This is interesting. Many universities teach Java, C, C++ or Python as a first language. The headache that many first year students suffer from these basic (relatively speaking) languages is readily apparent. Rust is very strict, and it requires an entirely different mindset to use. I wonder how this would fare with students who have a clean slate.