One thing on the plus site: a tech blogger was calling out a tournament for the fastest string tokenizer in any language. I wrote a very naive Rust tokenizer in 5 minutes max and it easily won second place. First place was a highly optimized assembler code.

I am not sure the assembler thing would handle UTF-8 as well as my incredibly low effort Rust solution tho.

What I want to say with this is: There are real, tangible advantages to the language when some noob who would shoot himself into the leg three times while writing the C/C++ equivalent manages to write safe code that performs well while not investing a lot of time.