[narimiran]

> Can someone sell me on using rust over python?

I can't. But I can try to sell you Nim [0] as a compiled/faster addition to your Python, from my own experience of using it in last few months and coming from Python.

It uses significant whitespace and the syntax will surely look familiar to any Pythonista, and the entry barrier is much lower (i.e. learning curve is much shallower) than Rust.

Speed improvements I experienced are in the range of 10-100x, while the code doesn't look that much different than Python. I have solved Advent of Code in both Nim and Python in parallel [1] so you can compare the solutions/syntax yourself.

[0] https://nim-lang.org/

[1] https://github.com/narimiran/AdventOfCode2017