I mostly use C++ for numerical simulations in physics and associated code (analysis, some visualization, etc.). That means my primary consideration is the ease and convenience of writing high performance code for a narrow set of hardware. I care about the quality of tooling, especially for performance analysis (including things like likwid [1]) and GPGPU computation. I do not care about safety (memory or otherwise) - my code doesn't take arbitrary input, run on shared hardware, do much of anything over networks or have memory safety crashes.
From this rather narrow point of view, Rust does very little to help and quite a lot to hinder me. Rust is very much about memory safety - an issue extremely far down my list of concerns - and to me the borrow checker is an anti-feature I'd love to turn off. None of this is in any way an indictment of Rust - it looks like a very well designed language that knows what it wants to accomplish. It just happens to want the exact opposite things from what I want, and that's fine. I know I'm in a weird minority (most of the people who think like I do seem to be game engine developers).
From this rather narrow point of view, Rust does very little to help and quite a lot to hinder me. Rust is very much about memory safety - an issue extremely far down my list of concerns - and to me the borrow checker is an anti-feature I'd love to turn off. None of this is in any way an indictment of Rust - it looks like a very well designed language that knows what it wants to accomplish. It just happens to want the exact opposite things from what I want, and that's fine. I know I'm in a weird minority (most of the people who think like I do seem to be game engine developers).
[1] https://github.com/RRZE-HPC/likwid