Productivity has many facets and is hard to measure. A lot of people feel very productive in rust because it catches a lot of problems early on. GC allows you t

Productivity has many facets and is hard to measure. A lot of people feel very productive in rust because it catches a lot of problems early on. GC allows you to be sloppy in reasoning about the lifetime of an object, which is often an important design point that affects the overall system. Also, you typically have to think about lifetimes when writing libraries, not so much when writing applications that use the libraries.