[woodruffw]

> I think the potential of Rust is greatly oversold, because it only ever gets compared to known-unsafe cases, such as string handling in C; there are plenty of other languages that handle this safely out of the box.

The comparison is apt because of scope and scale: Rust is intended to integrate into and eventually replace C codebases; both Pascal and Modula-2 can integrate with C, but AFAIK do not place substantial emphasis on doing so (nor have substantial amounts of community interest in doing so).

Similarly: people keep doing string handling in C, so that is what is going to continue to matter. They also keep doing other things in C that Rust prevents, which are also going to continue to matter. The fact that they're known to be unsafe doesn't change that.

Put another way: it's unclear that the interest in Rust (which is immense) would ever translate into equivalent interest in Modula-2, any technical merits aside. The reality is that Rust does these things well, and a large number of people like it and are successfully using it to replace or augment C codebases. Both conditions are necessary.