Anyone up for giving me an elevator pitch that it would be? Or, also interested in confirmation that it wouldn't!
* exhaustive pattern matching
* Result and Option types
* builtin first class unit testing ability
* builtin first class documentation ability
The enforced exhaustive pattern matching tells you “hey you didn’t cover all cases.” Result and Option types make error handling explicit and ergonomic—the notion that each function can either succeed or fail is supported at the language level (in other languages, it’s up to you to ensure you’ve covered all cases and have thought about what “success” and “failure” mean for each function.
Testing is “built right into the language,” it’s frictionless. It’s super easy to write unit tests. You don’t have to canvass and vet a ton of testing frameworks to get going.
Documentation is easy, fun, and quick to write. So, now combine all the above with the culture of detailed documentation Rust has and now you’re really thinking through your codebase—you can use writing docs to tighten up the interfaces, seamlessly transition to writing a test that enforces some invariant, leverage “compiler driven development” to rinse and repeat this process.
The strongest reason to use Rust is that you’ve detailed the requirements for a piece of code and determine Rust is a better fit than LangX. A weaker, but still valuable reason to use Rust is to experience the discipline and idioms Rust enforces/enables and then take that experience back to your native language (I.e. exhaustive matching, which of used in certain ways can be a kind of “proof by cases” that your code does exactly what you expect, then you can easily inspect what you expect via tests).
1) Latency/peformance/concurrency/server costs
or
2) Extreme correctness
If neither of these things is a current or anticipated problem for you, it may not be worth it (though you could always do an exploratory project to find out!). Make no mistake: like any engineering decision, for all its advantages it does come with some costs.