[Manishearth]

Sure they do. But when you say "gurus" and "magicians" these are people who have spent decades with the language and are awesome at it. It's possible that Rust may improve their lives, but it would take years before they have that same level of proficiency. Not because Rust is hard, but because they are so good at C++ and getting that good in anything is hard.

Rust does market to C/++ people, a lot. We just don't market to the super-awesome C++ folks. It's the same reason I preferred Word 2003 over the new stuff for half a decade. I had years of memorized shortcuts, custom macros, and general ui familiarity. I could eventually learn the shiny new Word and become as good, but the activation energy for that is too much and I was happy with 2003.

Rust isn't only going after non-systems folks. The community is roughly half systemsy. But it may seem this way because Rust tries very hard to not alienate non-systems people with jargon and unexplained systems concepts.