> But I'm always skeptical when underlying language choice is featured prominently as a selling point for any new project.> It tells me, this is a technology-first, users-second enthusiast project.
> And thus, I'll be surprised if it tackles the deepest issues users need solved.
Some of the deepest issues that users need solved are ones that Rust was designed to solve at the language and compiler level.
1. System stability and memory efficiency, zero or fewer crashes due to memory-safety or thread-safety problems.
2. Security and assurance via the elimination of entire classes of attack vectors like buffer overflows.
3. Highly performant, responsive applications that are a joy to use.
Solving problems at the compiler level eliminates the reliance on fallible programmers to do so. People also tend to discount maintaining those solutions over years of dev team turnover, startup failures, etc. Building those solutions, capabilities, and constraints into the language itself makes maintenance over the entire product lifecycle more consistent.
It's like buying a Toyota, you know from the brand alone that you're getting a certain baseline level of reliability, maintainability, durability, and longevity. Rust is like the Toyota of programming languages - it can produce many different types of cars/programs, but they're all guaranteed to come with a baseline level of assurance, and to eliminate common classes of problems that degrade the end-user experience.
It may not make sense for other languages to be prominently featured as a selling point, but Rust is an exception.