[dthul]

Whether you should learn it or not I can't answer, but I want to mention that I personally don't feel anything in Rust is very esoteric. Python's metaclasses or JavaScript's prototype object model feel more unusual to me than anything I encountered in Rust. If you have never written in an unmanaged language like C++ though I could see that a lot of Rust feels foreign.

[cgh]

Lifetimes qualify as esoteric, I think. They seem unique to Rust (please correct me if wrong) and are not immediately intuitive.

[duped]

C++ developers deal with lifetimes all the time (grep for "outlive" in a large codebase, for example). It just isn't baked into the language.

The notion of the "lifetime" is fundamental to systems programming, particularly when dealing with concurrency. It's quite natural to folks who are used to dealing with use-after-free/use-after-move and iterator invalidation bugs, imo.