Some people in this thread have made the claim that Rust is okay for quick hacky code to work out a solution to a problem, because you can just pepper your code with unwrap and clone and then factor them out later during optimisation. The point I am making is that even if that approach works[0], it heavily obscures your business logic to have it peppered with memory management details when you're just trying to figure out a basic algorithm to solve a problem.
The approach I much prefer is to Plan to Throw One Away[1]. I'd rather work out the solution to my problem in a slow and dynamic language like Python, and then either rewrite it entirely in C or, if possible, just rewrite some inner loop in C and call it from Python.
[0]: I don't think this approach actually works. You can't take a program that has been designed around copying data absolutely everywhere, all over the place, and make it very efficient. You can make it more efficient than it was originally, but I've never seen it done. You can only really work out the right way to manage memory when you know the algorithm, and you can only know the algorithm once you are done. Refactoring from one memory management strategy to another might be possible in theory but is awful in practice, even in Rust.