> what I mean is this - we all knew that the rb tree implementation of stl wasn't that hot, neither was its sort (note - this is 7 years back), however that library enabled a c++ project to be jumpstarted in significantly less time than building everything from scratch.

It's not that simple. You can't start with a language that lacks memory safety and add it later. Nor can you start with a language that uses global concurrent GC and try to reel it back in without losing safety. C++ is in the former category and I think there is no way for them to add memory safety at this point. Languages in the latter category really have no way of going back on global concurrent GC; the entire ecosystem is built around garbage collection.

Safe manual memory management is balanced on a very delicate precipice. You must carefully design your language around it for it to work. It is not something that can just be added later, like a faster red-black tree algorithm.

actually - I'm proposing the other way. In fact, what you just wrote above (about the RNG being cryptographically secure in Rust) makes me really, really, really excited to try out the language.

For a large portion of my career, I was building EDA (silicon design automation tools), so I have worked with trying to optimize one bit at a time with unsafe pointers biting my back constantly. IMHO partitioning an EDA netlist is a NP-hard problem, so there have been lots of very interesting startups that tried to solve that problem and failed.

I now work with Ruby and Python.

Trust me I do know the value of everything you wrote: I am just wondering - requesting even - if there is a way to bridge the "accessibility" gap. Is there a way (anything - a "quickstart" library or a safe-but-suboptimal-subset, etc.) that enables me to start hacking with Rust in a matter of minutes ?

Rust isn't even trying to do the same things Python has tried to do. That's not an apples to apples comparison and the fact that you would apply the two in the same cases betrays a lack of sensitivity to which languages are appropriate for what.