[stouset]

Ongoing maintenance and feature development on top of an existing code base is easily 10x the amount of time and effort of starting a new project greenfield. Even modest improvements in long-term readability and maintainability have disproportionately beneficial effects, even if the initial cost is somewhat high.

In my personal experience, once you're proficient in Rust, the initial cost is not somewhat high because those improvements in your ability to reason about your code base start snowballing quickly. And the long-term effects are enormous. I have literally picked up a project I hadn't worked on in years, made sweeping changes to the internals, and had every test pass in a pretty comprehensive suite the very first time it compiled.