>So there could be a simpler language with Rust’s safety guarantees if you were willing to strip out traits, async etc? Well yes, there exists a hypothetical C

>So there could be a simpler language with Rust’s safety guarantees if you were willing to strip out traits, async etc? Well yes, there exists a hypothetical C + borrow-checker language. But that language wouldn't really be significantly simpler, because the borrow-checker is the largest contributor to Rust's complexity. The only things you would have taken away are the more well-understood features, as they already occur in other languages. The C/C++ comparison doesn't really work, because there is (to my knowledge) no single C++ feature which makes up the majority of its complexity over C. You could strip out independent features of C++ one at a time to return to a simpler language. Rust doesn't have the same property.