Why don't you use something else? Because, most (all?) of those other languages fall into one of three traps, they also have a lot of undefined behaviors, they

Why don't you use something else? Because, most (all?) of those other languages fall into one of three traps, they also have a lot of undefined behaviors, they define the behaviors in ways that don't reduce actual programming bugs (javascript!), or they have so rigorously defined the language with underlying assumptions (say a really strong memory model, signaling NaN, overflow exceptions, etc) that the performance is sub-optimal on any platform that doesn't exactly fit the expected machine description. Really, C isn't hard if you burn your copy of K&R and stop trying to be so damn clever. It also turns out to be a lot more readable, if a bit more verbose, if one ignores a lot of its "features" and pretends its pascal with a single statement, without side effects per line. That includes using pointers in any kind of arithmetic (or type casting), instead using them only as though they were C++ references. (and a few other basic rules). So, while I don't think rust is a particularly good language, I'm also starting to think that everyone should be forced to use it early in their career so they are forced to consider object ownership and lifetime in a rigorous way. Then when they move to C/C++/etc they wont be foot-gunning themselves at every turn.