I'm not a systems engineer, I just do data analysis and algorithms that sometimes need to go really fast.

I only recently investigated rust, and was hugely impressed with it. I regret not investigating it earlier. Language support for ownership and lifetime of variables is such a huge step up for writing code. Trying to do this through as hoc conventions in C, or through RAII in C++, is a lot harder.

I haven't yet had a chance to write anything significant in rust beyond a few small test projects, but next time I want to beat Python performance on something I'll be using Rust instead of Cython or C or C++.