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It's interesting that I've also heard the same from people involved in Rust. Expecting more interest from C++ programmers and being surprised by the numbers of Ruby/Python programmers interested.

I wonder if it's that Ruby/Python programmers were interested in using these kinds of languages but were being pushed away by C/C++.

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The people writing C++ either don't need much convincing to switch because they see the value or are unlikely to give it up anytime soon because they don't see anything Rust does as being useful to them, very little middle ground. People from higher level languages on the other hand see in Rust a way to break into a space that they would otherwise not attempt because it would take too long a time to reach proficiency. The hard part of Rust is trying to simultaneously have hard to misuse APIs and no additional performance penalty (however small). If you relax either of those goals (is it really a problem if you call that method through a v-table?), then Rust becomes much easier to write. I think GC Rust would already be a nice language to use that I'd love, like a less convoluted Scala, it just wouldn't have fit in a free square that ensured a niche for it to exist and grow, and would likely have died in the vine.

I think on average C++ programmers are more interested in Rust than in Go. But C programmers are on average probably not interested in either. I do agree that the accessible nature of the two languages (or at least perception thereof) compared to C and C++ is probably why there's more people coming from higher-level languages interested in the benefits of static typing and better performance.

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