I agree with everything you've said here, except that the reality of speaking with a "rust first" developer is making me feel suddenly ancient. But that aside, the memory safety parts are a huge benefit, but far from the only one. Option and Result types are delightful. Exhaustive matching expressions that won't compile if you add a new variant that's not handled are huge. Types that make it impossible to accidentally pass a PngImage into a function expecting a str, even though they might both be defined as contiguous series of bytes down deep, makes lots of bugs impossible. A compiler that gives you freaking amazing error messages that tell you exactly what you did wrong and how you can fix it sets the standard, from my experience. And things like "cargo clippy" which tell you how you could improve your code, even if it's already working, to make it more efficient or more idiomatic, are icing on the cake.
People so often get hung up on Rust's memory safety features, and dismiss is as through that's all it brings to the table. Far from it! Even if Rust were unsafe by default, I'd still rather use it that, say, C or C++ to develop large, robust apps because it has a long list of features that make it easy to write correct code, and really freaking challenging to write blatantly incorrect code.
Frankly, I envy you, except that I don't envy what it's going to be like when you have to hack on a non-Rust code base that lacks a lot of these features. "What do you mean, int overflow. Those are both constants! How come it didn't let me know I couldn't add them together?"
People so often get hung up on Rust's memory safety features, and dismiss is as through that's all it brings to the table. Far from it! Even if Rust were unsafe by default, I'd still rather use it that, say, C or C++ to develop large, robust apps because it has a long list of features that make it easy to write correct code, and really freaking challenging to write blatantly incorrect code.
Frankly, I envy you, except that I don't envy what it's going to be like when you have to hack on a non-Rust code base that lacks a lot of these features. "What do you mean, int overflow. Those are both constants! How come it didn't let me know I couldn't add them together?"