It seems that the main problem with Rust is that it has been grown up <i>not</i> from the CS and PL theory <i>fundamentals</i>, like ML, or Scheme or Erlang or even Go, and it is obviously not a small, clean language everyone loves and appreciates as being beautiful. In other words it is just little better than C++, which is a crap.<p>If a language could be grown from ML (Ocaml) roots (like Scala) instead of C++, it could be <i>much</i> smaller, cleaner and more pleasant to work with. Rust's only innovation is in the compiler tech, which could be ported and <i>simplified</i> (due to more predictable semantics of a functional language) to any ML-family language.<p>I cannot overemphasize how beautiful the pattern-matching with local bindings on algebraic data-types is, and what a wonderful thing is Erlang's pattern-matching on receive, and how, say, protobuf is basically product/record-types annotations, which could be done in a ML-family language itself etc.<p>Rust is under the curse of C++ (a statically typed and standardized dialect of PHP3) if you wish. It is obviously good language compared to C++, but somehow Ruby-ish, compared to ML-family languages.<p>It is actually a pity that Rust and not ML/Ocaml are considered cool and sexy by modern teenagers (like it used to be with Ruby and with Rails not so long ago). ML is much better starting point than C++. Perhaps, polished to perfection languages (Scheme, Haskell) are less appealing for the crowd being too dry, without ambivalence.<p>BTW, the next cool language definitely should be something like typed Erlang with Ocaml's syntax ;) - a hybrid into which typed Python or Typescript are growing into.