[mwindow]

I disagree. Rust still requires thinking about low-level details like lifetimes, aliasing, whether/when to use `Box` or `Rc` etc., Even when these are not explicitly spelled-out sometimes (like in lifetime elision), the programmer still has to be aware of these. Plus, modern C++ also abstracts away raw pointers by your definition, and has `unique_ptr` and `shared_ptr` which are the same as `Box` and `Rc` respectively. Bare pointers are frowned upon in modern C++ too. Furthermore, the OP talks about languages high-level enough to be used by biologists, while maintaining an acceptable performance.

[xyhopguy]

Problems like the benchmark in the post are actually really simple to write in rust. They're all essentially streaming algorithms with some simple parsing.

Fwiw rust has completely replaces cpp for high performant bioinfx code in my workflows. Sooo much easier to write than cpp!