I don't really use Rust so YMMV, but what's genuinely special about it is that it's a new take on a system-level language with very modern features (Error mona

I don't really use Rust so YMMV, but what's genuinely special about it is that it's a new take on a system-level language with very modern features (Error monad, borrow checker, pattern matching, functional-like semantics) that were previously exclusive domain of garbage collected languages. Honestly I kind of cringe at the "do everything in rust" crowd, if you need to, say, write an API, you can just do that in Python or Ruby or Go, 99% of the times the performance penalty won't matter and Rust is just a very complicated tool for that job. But it single-handedly reopened the discussion on high performance, safe(r) languages, and I believe that's a very good thing even though I don't use Rust day-to-day. Projects like Zig are in a sense following in the footsteps of Rust.