Thanks for those, I agree. Although I think the term invest you used is very applicable, there'll definitely be a larger barrier to entry.

I don't think they've every heard of Rust and it is a relatively minor project for a small section of the uni. As much as I would love to jump on the Rust bandwagon, I feel more confident that Node.js would be a more "justifiable" choice. It might be easy to understand well written Rust code, but trying to implement something new will need an understanding of lifetimes and memory management.

I would love to see Rust in the web spotlight, it shares blood with C/C++, but it has real potential in higher level abstractions as well. It would be great to have a solid go-to web framework, like Phoenix or Rails, we'll have to wait and see. Good luck with your own endeavour!