Rust is coming along though. It’s the first language I have seen that might unseat C++.
Can you elaborate in what way? I was under the impression the amount of low-level control was equal.
[1]: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... (these benchmarks are not representative of all workloads, but it gives you a general idea)
I think that is a bigger problem than using a language that gives you 10% less performance than C++. And anyway algorithms are typically are more important than the language in terms of performance.
Doubtful, as C++ has language standards and a visible, comprehensible story on how they evolve. C++ has also been evolving faster than Rust.
Right now Rust fills the "C++ with training wheels" niche - when you need a language in this space but don't have the energy or time to disentangle the sordid story of all the crufty legacy systems built around C++ after all this time.
But in principle if somebody made a well thought-out onboarding story for C++ then there's be little point in Rust.
P.S. But you say "my borrow checker" - well, sorry to disappoint you, people don't really care and actually view it as an impediment in learning Rust, not as a feature. If Rust had no borrow checker it'd be an even more popular language.
If you don’t see the value of compile-time memory safety in Rust, you probably haven’t spent hours debugging subtle runtime memory safety errors in a large C application.
The people who choose Rust over C++ aren't (generally speaking, there are of course exceptions) doing because of the borrow checker. They're doing because Rust has Cargo and C++ doesn't.
I can count on one hand the memory errors I have debugged in five years. The longest took a half-hour. (Code that used a "relaxed" atomic load was moved to a place where it needed "acquire" -- which is the default.) So, I eagerly prefer (rounding up) 2.5 hours of debugging spent in five years over spending 5 extra hours every week -- 1750 hours in 5 years -- waiting on builds from a very slow compiler. (I don't know any reason why the Rust compiler could not be two orders of magnitude faster, and notably faster than a C++ compiler.)
My experience may be unusual in that I do not habitually depend on code badly-written by other people. My complaints about other people's code I do use are more typically about performance, conformability to requirements, or poor usability.
I could be wrong, but I would wager that you are definitely an outlier among C and C++ developers. For the remaining majority, I believe that the compile-time memory safety guarantees that Rust provides are huge.
As to why your experience is different, it could be that you're simply (1) a talented programmer, (2) work with talented programmers, or (3) don't work on a large and complex legacy codebase, or some combination of the above.