[burakemir]

Agreed. The large and passionate community may have multiple factors but "things actually work" is probably a factor.

It is hard to get a full picture of how academic research influenced Rust and vice versa. Two examples:

- The use of linearity for tracking ownership in types has been known to academics but had never found its way into a mainstream language.

- researchers in programming language semantics pick Rust as a target of formalization, which was only possible because of design choices around type system. They were able to apply techniques that resulted from decades of trying to get a certified C. They have formalized parts of the standard library, including unsafe Rust, and found and fixed bugs.

So it seems fair to say that academic research on safety for C has contributed much to what makes Rust work today, and in ways that are not possible for C and C++ because these languages do not offer static guarantees where types Transport information about exclusive access to some part of memory.