I know there's been several articles lately about broader applications of rust, and then "is it worth it?" type responses, concerns about "manual memory management", with the implication being there's some heavy tax on not using a GC.
I would certainly agree with the presence of this tax while writing C/C++. (Less with C++, RAII, and especially c++11, but still there.)
With rust, once you're up the learning curve (which, granted, can take a few months), your productivity is not substantially worse than GC'd languages. You pretty much master the borrow checker's semantics, and the best practices to structure things in ways that play nicely with its expectations. And lifetime-related errors don't occupy all that much of your development time.
Source: my team has been re-writing some components of Dropbox's multi-exabyte storage system in rust (from go) over the last 9 months.