There are plenty of reasons why Rust could win outside of requiring safe manual memory management. It is an expression based language with ad-hoc polymorphism, algebraic data types, hygienic macros, first class functions, and race-free concurrency.
I don't use rust because I don't need manual memory management and I require subtype polymorphism for a lot of things, but I choose Scala over D.
I don't use rust because I don't need manual memory management and I require subtype polymorphism for a lot of things, but I choose Scala over D.