You can find plenty of reasons to love Rust, without even getting to the technical details.
Not really, once you start something more complicated than hello world and start to try mutate things for example it get 100x more complicated that Python.
In fact, Rust is MORE high level than python and most languages. That is exactly the borrow checker and all the other things are.
What is not, is being "simple" as python.
I code now full Rust and is the most productive language in my +20 years of this. My other picks: python, Delphi, FoxPro.
But is not productive exactly the same way python/delphi is. It has other axes of it. So in some task Python is unmatched and my main pick for scripting or brainstorming stuff. But Rust is the best at being overall productive.
Where is not (today) is lack of time/resources to be there (like GUIs. But honestly, nothing compare to FoxPro/delphi)...
Amen. Every so often I boot up Lazarus and lament what could have been. Even the best web-dev frontend tools and frameworks do not come close.
I wonder if there is even a market for those sorts of tools today, though. I wasn't there for the decline of Delphi (and FoxPro, et al), so I've no real reference as to why they declined.
The tools are out there, even Delphi is still being sold and having a yearly conference in Germany.
They declined because only developers working at Fortune 500's get to pay for software.
When one only wants to have free beer, they get to have what the street bazaars can offer, instead of what the monks are using at the cathedral.
My dream is rebuild it: https://tablam.org!
This is very off weird take: Refactoring in Rust is one of their strengths as language (a major one!) where even VERY deep changes can be done in economical times.
Try the same in python is nearly impossible.
And I mean it: I fully rewritten all my app (a fairly complex niche eCommerce platform) to async and remade all things along it.
And I have A LOT of experience building, rewriting, and porting code; and Rust is the faster/more friendly to refactor both large or small in all my years.
However, I concede that get the knowledge with Rust have challenges and my first attempts at this (when doing my hobby https://tablam.org language) were miserable by lack of understanding, so it could be a factor.
I would use Rust for Web if I'd have to squeeze every bit of performance. Most of the of the time I don't have such need for performance.
A few that come to my mind: C++ Builder, QT, Windows Forms, Xamarin, .NET MAUI.
Mutating things is mostly not that difficult, just add mut to the declaration and then &mut if you pass it around.
The most difficult thing was lifetimes.
E: borrows got a little tricky as well
If you program in a functional way anyway, i.e. having data go through a series of filters, it is quite easy. But not all ways of programming are so easy to port to Rust.
I don't know about 100x, using Box and mutexes it is pretty much as complicated or maybe 2x. If you want it to be efficient and leverage all of Rust then sure, but that wasn't what they were meaning.
One tiny program does not a realistic comparison make, of course. There’s tons of situations where either language can make things more complex than this example. But for basic tasks it’s not particularly complicated.
Look at the first example. It can be very similar.
Strange example, but I suppose making the corresponding python more complex is one way to make them equivalent.
[1] https://www.starlette.io/ [2] https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/ [3] https://trio.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
What about Haskell? Can it be similarly high level as Haskell?
Or that the only users you know about are vocal…because how would you know about the non-vocal ones?