Feels like most people reacting to this think it's about C vs Rust. And part of it is, but the bigger conclusion is: If you're starting a new programming project, you probably shouldn't be using a systems language at all. Go, Java, C#, Swift, Python, or Ruby are probably better choices for most projects.

Go in particular has a lot of the advantages of C/C++ and Rust--fully-compiled binary, easy access to system calls, high performance--without the overhead of needing to constantly think about memory management.