Even supposing that Rust and C++ have the same level of complexity, the style and consequences of their complexity are wildly different. A lot of the various pi

Even supposing that Rust and C++ have the same level of complexity, the style and consequences of their complexity are wildly different. A lot of the various pieces of complexity of C++ needs to be held in the head of a human who is writing it, but most of Rust's complexity can be left to the compiler and humans only need to page in the pieces the compiler points out. C++'s complexity often manifests as, basically, a list of rules[1] that the programmer should follow perfectly to reduce the risk of their compiled code not doing what they want. A lot of C++'s hairiest complexity is driven by weird interactions between "independent" language features (often driven in part by the goal of C backwards compatibility), and other complexities are just driven by the C-style mindset of hoping/requiring that programmers don't make mistakes. A lot of these (especially in the latter category) result in code that compiles fine, but misbehaves at runtime. On the other hand, neither of these categories apply to Rust: Rust's complexity is mostly pushed into the compiler, which tries to flag problems early. Instead of having a list of rules they need to follow themselves, programmers have a compiler that checks their code against the list (the result ends up being somewhat similar to the C++ core guidelines). Computers are far less fallible than humans, and so programmers can have more trust that they won't miss something. Of course, this definitely can have the effect of making writing code seem hard because it forces the programmer to resolve/defend against a lot of errors up front. [1]: https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC... (I should say that a lot of these rules are great, and apply more broadly than just C++, but significant chunks are "work-arounds" for things C++ compilers don't check and things that the standard library often doesn't help with either, particularly in the resource management and concurrency sections.)