>1 - If memory management is a serious problem for the software you work on, I've never found the boost library lacking. This seems like the main selling point for RUST. Given the scope of the project: you guys must be doing something that is so different that it couldn't be rolled into a library - so I'm looking forward to your future posts to see if there is something here that I really am missing out on.

I would say that Rust's defining feature is the borrow checker[1], which eliminates an entire category of pointer related errors at compile time.

>3 - A lot of things are renamed. auto->let, new->box, switch->box You get the feeling that effort was put in to make the language explicitly look different from C++

Rust is strongly influenced by the ML family of languages. I believe that's where some of the keywords came from.

>4 - the Rust switch statement don't fall through... This one was truly mind blowing. The one useful feature of switch statement got ripped it out! If you don't really need the fall through, I'd just avoid using them completely...

Rust doesn't have a classical switch statement. Instead, it has a 'match' keyword that performs pattern matching on the input so you can easily destructure a complicated blob of data into more manageable pieces. This is also a concept borrowed from the ML family. If you really wanted to, you could write a macro that emulates the C style switch statement.

>5 - I've never really seen an equivalent to boost (in combination to the STL) in other languages (maybe I didn't look hard enough). Could you maybe make a post about the RUST standard library? Libraries are always the deal breaker

There's a great overview[2] of what the standard distribution contains on the Rust website.

[1] http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/rustc/middle/borrowck...

[2] http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/index.html#libraries