I haven't noticed this "bashing" you speak of, and I've kept a close eye on every Rust thread on HN the last few years. That said, I think that in 2016, whatev

I haven't noticed this "bashing" you speak of, and I've kept a close eye on every Rust thread on HN the last few years. That said, I think that in 2016, whatever one can say about the unsafety of C and C++ deserves to be said, loudly, and I think it needs to be heard. Programs shouldn't be susceptible to buffer overruns, race conditions or null-pointer crashes. Users shouldn't be disrupted, and servers shouldn't be compromised. In other words, we should expect more, and I think giving C and C++ some competition is a good idea. I agree that Rust's marketing has been too focused on safety, though. For me, it's a few bullet points down on the list. I'm much more excited by ADTs, pattern matching, solid generics, and the performance potential that can come from zero-cost abstractions and flexible approaches to memory management.