This was more interesting than the average "rewrite in Rust" blog post. Specifically I thought the part about how having compiler-enforced memory safety allows for the use of patterns that would otherwise be difficult to use safely interesting.
I have to say, this has been amazing. For context, I'm a C++ developer who has had minimal run-ins with the borrow checker because I was already used to thinking about ownership. I refactored a large-ish Rust crate I maintain to use references for a fundamental type. I would have considered it irresponsible to do that with a C++ codebase unless absolutely required. Even if I did the upfront analysis to make sure it was safe, I'd need to re-do that exercise for every architectural change, at least. Instead with Rust, I just tried it on a whim, knowing the borrow checker had my back.
Unfortunately very few care to actually use them. https://www.bfilipek.com/2019/12/cpp-status-2019.html?m=1#wh...
As I learned since Turbo Pascal days, if it isn't part of the language, it seldom gets used.
But also there is a big difference between "the static checker will probably catch errors of this kind" and "the compiler will certainly catch errors of this kind". The latter is far more liberating.
Much like Erlang's concurrency fell out as a consequence of needing to be confidently write high availability code, Rust's general safety falls out of needing to write concurrent code fearlessly.
Rust used to have split stacks and green threads for instance, and had special syntax for GC’d values (and unique pointers TBF).