[kbenson]

An alternative interpretation might be that rust has particular appeal to those that primarily use dynamic languages. It's probably both, but I will say that as someone that's busy getting stuff done in Perl[1] every day, rust looks appealing, and a lot of that has to do with guarantees. If I'm going to give up the convenience of Perl for a lower level language[2], I need to be sold. Rust's promise of provably correct memory management sounds really good in that situation.

1: I've used lower level languages, but for nothing large, and I haven't started a project in C, C++ or even Java in over a decade, and was never very enamored.