Instead, we get an alternative to unsafe, native and safe, scripting languages without most advantages of the best of either. I might still try it out if I do a comparative evaluation of modern work. By that time, it might have gotten better.
I hope you understand first stable release of Rust happened less than 2 weeks ago (15 May 2015), vs. Go's Go 1 in March 2012.
3 years is pretty big difference.
Of course, but Rust has been in tech news for a while already. E.g., the Rust 0.1 post garnered 82 comments[1], over 3 years ago. Rust seems to be first mentioned in a submission title 5 years ago.
Of course, their inception was not exactly at the same time. But if we look back in 20 years, it's the same timeframe. Just like e.g. Python and Ruby, despite being 4 years apart. Or C and Pascal.
It's not fair to Rust to compare it to Go, as if they are at the same stage of their adoption and development. Several years is makes a big difference in the tech world.
It seems ridiculously reasonable to compare programming languages on the time-scale of modern computing (~70 years). Dismissing the comparison like that is pretty crazy.
However, don't get me wrong: I totally agree that the years between the stable releases of the projects makes a big difference, especially now, while it is such a large percentage of the total lifetime of them.
I guess people compare Rust and Go because they were released in similar timeframes and people like to view things in competition.
Rust is especially attractive when you can't afford a garbage collector, need deterministic destruction, and full compatibility with C. It's what C++ would be if it could start from scratch.
I think your point needs to be re-iterated more often: if garbage collection and ~2-3x the running time of C is not a problem, OCaml, Haskell, Scala, F#, etc. are the competition of Go. They integrate modern (read: mostly 70ies/80ies) language design insights, while providing approximately the same performance as Go.