I've been writing rust for several years now and I still enjoy it. No other language has given me that satisfaction. I don't care if it's hard because, for me, it's the fun kind of hard.
I think Rust may be a trap.
The 'feeling of satisfaction' of making it work according to those strict rules, I think might be a kind of intellectual heroin for developers.
I believe we may be vastly overestimating the value of that supposed 'correctness' - and also don't contemplate that it's only a specific kind of correctness.
Developers are the kind of people that will naturally hone in on solving problems and building things, and our intuition may not be remotely attuned to necessarily creating value. We'll build some 'perfect thing' long before we build some 'useful thing'.
I've become very skeptical of rust for this reason, it's so addictive to a certain personality type that I wonder if there is true reasoning behind the need for hyper strictness.
I don't think we need Rust actually, I think we just needed a 'clean' version of C++ with some nicer things around pointers and that would have been fine.
Edit: Should say I'm not against Rust, it's super cool, and likely has applications. I'm just skeptical of our reaction to it. I think it's 'borrow checker v1.0' and future languages may improve on that.
The C++ community has tried this approach, and the outcome (viz. the C++ Core Guidelines) while definitely useful was far less "clean" than Rust itself. You're definitely right that some developers overestimate the need for complex solutions, but this failure mode seems rather more common in the C++ community and it's a bit weird to criticize Rust for it.
But I also agree with the other posters that this is a bit missing the point about what type and memory safety are supposed to achieve.
In all seriousness, if type safety feels like a burden and not an aid, then either you're using the wrong language for the application or the wrong language for the developer.
Don't forget that Rust exists to solve a problem. And that problem for the most part is not web development.
You can write a small script or tool in any language, probably even assembly if you have the experience.
Bigger applications, developed by multiple people, and longer-term-maintenance are where it gets interesting.
Then, when you suddenly have to refactor and migrate ten thousands of lines of code, the difference that "strict rules" make becomes very visible.
How Rust will do in this regards only time will tell.
It needs another lifecycle of the language ("Rust 2") and the same for the wide used libraries before it can be compared to languages like C++, Java in a more meaningful way.
It's not about that. Whole your comment is based on this false statement .