> but man Rust was a breath of fresh air with the amount of tooling that helped me solve problems

The tooling is the #1 reason I'd like to learn rust. I have not kept up with C++ and I'm not sure I ever will... sometimes plain C seems more straightforward. But those languages (C++ especially) have suffered from lack of standard tooling, in my opinion.

Even C# being a few years younger than Java seems to have made a huge difference in tooling availability (I'm sure having a single corporate driver during its lifetime made a difference, too).

I'm excited by the prospect of a compiled language with modern tooling.