Really the cognitive load of modern Rust is no less than C++$RECENT in my experience. Both require a ton of prima-facie concepts before you can productively read code from other developers. Of en vogue languages, Zig is the only one that seems to view keeping the "metaphor flood" under control as a design goal, we'll see how things evolve.
But really, and I say this from the perspective of someone in the embedded world who still does most of his serious work in C and cares about code generation and linkage: I think the whole concept of these Extremely Heavy Systems Programming Languages is not long for this world. In modern systems, managed runtimes a-la Go/Swift/JVM/.NET and glue via crufty type-light environments like Python and Javascript are absolutely where the world has ended up.
And I increasingly get the feeling that those of us left arguing over which monstrosity to use in our shrinking domain are... kinda becoming the joke.
But really, and I say this from the perspective of someone in the embedded world who still does most of his serious work in C and cares about code generation and linkage: I think the whole concept of these Extremely Heavy Systems Programming Languages is not long for this world. In modern systems, managed runtimes a-la Go/Swift/JVM/.NET and glue via crufty type-light environments like Python and Javascript are absolutely where the world has ended up.
And I increasingly get the feeling that those of us left arguing over which monstrosity to use in our shrinking domain are... kinda becoming the joke.