How developed is the ecosystem? One thing I enjoy about .net is the huge number of free and commercial libraries, the great IDE, and the ability to code a very broad range of applications with a single language (website, CLI, GUI, service, etc). Is Rust comparable?
Not at all. Rust has a long, long road ahead before it has an ecosystem comparable to Java or .NET. These systems have literally man centuries of work poured into them.
That said, I still predict Rust becoming the most important language of the decade, if not the decades that follow simply due to the strength of its foundation. Rust solves problems that no other language has--real problems with actual costs--, and fits into a very interesting space where it can eat away at the lethargic incumbants.
Rust is a web service language [1]. A desktop application language [2]. A CLI tooling language [3]. A core system library language. A game development language (eventually) [4]. It has a bright future ahead in so many different domains, and the tooling and libraries will come and reinforce this.
I suggest a thought experiment: take a few random projects you have or plan to work on, go to [1] and search for the kind of packages you need and see what's missing. It's getting better all the time, and you'll find most straightforward projects are totally doable in Rust.
