I typically explain that Rust's safety has side effects that are beneficial outside the obviousness of merely being safe. Namely, Rust's safety allows for migra

I typically explain that Rust's safety has side effects that are beneficial outside the obviousness of merely being safe. Namely, Rust's safety allows for migrating runtime checks into compile-time checks when constructing state machines around the ownership mechanism. Additionally, Rust's safety allows for additional compiler optimizations, because that safety can make more guarantees about the safeness of certain internal compiler flags. These have a speed benefit in addition to the already existing convenience benefits of not having to fight with broken code. I'd much rather fight a borrow checker than to fight through gdb's and lldb's to figure out why everything's totally broken. Then I go on to explain that there's a lot of great features in Rust that make it more convenient than C/C++ in a wide range of general purpose programming tasks. The pattern matching, sum types (Option/Result), error handling strategy, and my favorite, the Iterator trait. For the performance-minded C/C++ software developers, I explain that the safety that Rust provides via lifetimes and ownership allows me to comfortably perform extreme performance optimizations that would otherwise be incredibly nasty and error prone in C/C++ codebases. I can feel safe knowing that if it compiles, it's almost always going to work how I expect. Then there's the whole test-driven development mentality to Rust software development that Rust provides with `cargo test` and `cargo bench`, and data-oriented programming approach that Rust takes versus the inferior object-oriented approach via protocol-oriented programming (traits) to feature ad-hoc polymorphism and generics. It's a bit more complicated to explain that though. Then there's the whole community/tooling/documentation pitch. I think this is one of the more important aspects of Rust as it demonstrates that Rust has a future and is more than just a niche. It has momentum which cannot be destroyed. It's a language invented during the age of the Internet and takes full advantage of that. Rust does not employ guerrilla warfare tactics like other languages have done in the past. You can think of C/C++/Java/etc. as long-running empires. Guerrilla warfare-style tactics simply don't work against them. Emerging languages have always targeted C/C++/Java/etc. through guerrilla warfare tactics -- a loose community that mostly does their own thing. Rust is ambitiously establishing an empire of it's own through it's community -- a plethora of official projects and services: rustup, cargo, crates.io, docs.rs, users forum, internals forum, reddit thread, official documentation, docs team, an official book, GitHub hosting, etc. It's a recipe for success.