"Rust has made the decision that safety is more important than developer productivity. This is the right tradeoff to make in many situations — like building code in an OS kernel, or for memory-constrained embedded systems — but I don’t think it’s the right tradeoff in all cases, especially not in startups where velocity is crucial."

I completely disagree with this statement. If a Rust developer takes longer to code some feature this time will eventually be saved fixing memory bugs later on. And don't forget the immaterial cost of losing customer confidence if the product crashes or glitches because of memory instability.

And then I'm even glossing over the enormous benefit of Rust when writing correct multi-threaded code, which is almost always a minefield in C/C++. Code that looks and seems to work OK might in production suddenly crash after a year or so. A complete nightmare!

Memory safety is ALWAYS a good thing to have.