It's interesting, there's a weird dual-character to it. Some people see it like you do, some people see it as a low-level language with some extra features. :)

One thing that you may not realize, talking about HOF and such: LLVM is very good at compiling them down. If you use a closure that doesn't actually close over anything, it will get turned into a regular old function, for example. Which means it can be inlined...

Rust pointers are not always fat. Slices are, but &T is a regular old pointer, as far as the assembly goes.

&mut T automatically gets `restrict` applied to it, basically, we do a lot of aliasing stuff as well.

Thanks for elaborating :) I should spend some time with Ada.