Take

Rust is impressive for many reasons, but not the least because it was an ambitious long-term bet. It was researched for years, with the explicit aim to rule out the safety issues Mozilla ran into all the time when maintaining Gecko, and it brought a new focus of combining safety with zero cost-abstractions that do not require runtime support. Not many other languages has a known and commonly targeted subset for functionality that does not require run-time allocation. With Mozilla's previous experience of writing Gecko in the first place to replace the Netscape 4 rendering engine (a famously drawn-out process), they wanted something that could support them in gradually renovating their browser subsystems, and so far the results have been encouraging.

I have looked into it, and in my experience so far the programming model has been very cumbersome for me. It requires you to think in new ways and specify the world, and this is a common refrain even for people much less dense than me. I'm not sure what could be made to help the ergonomics, but from what I understand improvements have been made in usability already.

Cliff L. Biffle's Rewriting m4vgalib in Rust is a great capsule of the promise of Rust: prove that what you're doing is safe by mechanism and construction, and then not only avoid bugs but achieve minimum slowdown by unnecessary synchronization and the like. (Quite the inversion of terms combined to the more popular approach of wrapping things in smart wrappers, and one I hope is the wave of the future.)