This has been my experience as well. In fact, I often say that Rust is like a hyper-practical ML language, like Ocaml 2.0.

I learned Rust in 2016, and have kept up with it since. It was a painful first entry point, and then another rather painful experience when I first used it for a big hobby project, but now it is my go-to language because it's exactly as hard as it needs to be, has amazing community and documentation and libraries, and gives me the option to have really good performance while also using very nice ML-family linguistic constructs.

This is the most under appreciated feature of Python and Ruby. They got it right and other languages are still trying to catch up. Rust offers nothing better except memory safety at the expense of ease of use and with steep learning curve. Indeed same can be achieved by C, if one replace the complicated syntax and steep learning curve with better testing to check for memory safety. Zig language shows that it is possible to provide a simple way to write both memory safe or unsafe code.

Well begin is half done, and Python and Ruby made it so easy to program that without reading multiple of books and spending a year or two, programmers can write decent code. This is the reason why Go and Swift the other two system programming language is far ahead of Rust despite being GC language. Indeed even the latest OS Fuschia is written in C++ (zircon kernel), with Rust SDK to write high level programs same as the one written with Dart and flutter.

> Zig language shows that it is possible to provide a simple way to write both memory safe or unsafe code.

Zig is a kind of language that wouldn't have been written if its author discovered ATS[1] at a right time.

[1]: http://www.ats-lang.org

i was aware of ats before creating zig