My project to learn rust was a camera RAW format loader[1]. Compared to the good modern C++ codebase it's based on the end result supports the same formats, has the same performance, is only 20% of the lines of code, and is much safer to use (binary formats are rife for exploits). Doing all that took me less time than I had already spent previously fuzzing the C++ codebase and doing whack-a-mole on extremely scary exploitable bugs. For that use case it was extremely successful.

The next step is to build an image pipeline and editor around it[2][3]. For that the graphics ecosystem isn't as mature as the equivalent C/C++ ones but the possibilities are also amazing. The expressiveness of the language combined with the great LLVM backend means some things like very clean ways to do SIMD/threading become just a joy to use

If only I had the chance to work on this full time for a year... Help would be very much appreciated!

The kinds of things that become possible and even pleasent once you remove the mental overhead of dealing with the fundamental warts of C/C++ are amazing. After this experience with rust I don't see any reason to ever write C/C++ again.

[1] https://github.com/pedrocr/rawloader

[2] https://github.com/pedrocr/rawloader/tree/master/src/imageop... (to be spun out into its own crate)

[3] https://github.com/pedrocr/chimper