So my running conclusion is that Rust's founding decisions were made with a sort of "go big or go home" logic given this premise. To conclude that breaking even one part of C/C++ is grounds to throw up one's hands and drain the baby with the bathwater makes sense through this prism. At that point one might as well pour through the literature and academic languages to pick out all the goodies and gimmicks that haven't been mainstreamed before too.

The problem here is that Rust is not graceful replacement for C/C++. I'm being sold on Rust from a systems perspective and the system is already written in C. It's a simple and incomplete language begging for extension but it's done a good job of abstractly representing commodity computing hardware to a programmer for 50 years. Rust doesn't even make an attempt to gracefully regrade C/C++ into Safe-C++ and I can't come to any other conclusion that this is for nothing more than a lack of creativity.

There is an ignorance to the real costs of reinventing the wheel when one doesn't replace the original wheel too. That's why I am starting to truly convince myself Rust is actually harmful. If Rust gracefully took C in another direction (like C++ did), I could add Rust compilation units to my projects and share C interfaces which basically give me access to the entire existing universe so long as I use something like `extern "Rust" {` or visa-versa. If Rust broke ~10% of C++ I could put forth ~10% effort to port my projects to it and integrate it entirely. At a certain point down that vector, Rust can be the messianic "C++ done right" without looking back.