I'm a relative beginner in both Rust and C and I'd like to say that, as much as the learning curve for Rust could be better, even for a beginner, Rust is light

I'm a relative beginner in both Rust and C and I'd like to say that, as much as the learning curve for Rust could be better, even for a beginner, Rust is light years ahead of C, especially if you've used a more modern language. And using a hash table as an example is actually pretty sharp. Someone used to python might not know how much of a pain any type of container is in C. You could reasonably make the case it's easier to use hash tables in assembly -- the C language does you essentially no favors. Rust is quite amazing, though. Very slick, to the point where I use it and I don't care that much about things running fast or with low memory requirements, I just want something with the syntax and comprehensibility of python/ruby/etc (at least compared to erlang/elixir, which I'd otherwise use -- not having local mutable variables makes things a bit more puzzling for no reason like three times a day) and the sweet tools from haskell, and Rust fits the bill.