"However, the memory safety is not a productivity improvement as more of a safety improvement." I disagree. It frees you from chasing safety bugs and allows to

"However, the memory safety is not a productivity improvement as more of a safety improvement." I disagree. It frees you from chasing safety bugs and allows to invest more time in the features and that's clearly productivity win. For example rust does not suffer from compiler bugs as much as compilers written in C/C++ used to. Chrome and firefox developers spend a lot of time fixing buffer overflows and are likely to do this for many years to come. They certainly could do something more productive for everyone's benefit.