> As people usually say, Rust has a steep learning curve, and it’s really hard to get productive with it in a short amount of time. This is reflected in the 2019 Rust language survey, and it’s also reflected in the student frustration in the first few weeks of our weekly survey responses
> While I think Rust would be poorly motivated in CS 107, I think it is extra poorly suited for CS 110.
I have essentially no experience with Rust, and I want to like it. But I get the feeling that it isn't very user-friendly and that I would enjoy it much less than other memory safe languages like Swift, Go or Java or even sharper-edged languages like C++ with smart pointers or Objective-C with ARC.
Also given the large body of legacy C/C++ code still in use and development, I'm disappointed that clang still doesn't seem to support a memory-safe mode/ABI, as it could eliminate a large class of errors.
Maybe Unix made a critical error by adopting and promoting unsafe C; its predecessor Multics, written in PL/I, had essentially zero buffer, heap, or stack overflows over its entire lifetime (though it probably still had race conditions and concurrency errors.) ;-)