FWIW I was productive in Rust after a couple of months with a background ~5-10 years of experience in primarily JavaScript and PHP (no prior low level experienc

FWIW I was productive in Rust after a couple of months with a background ~5-10 years of experience in primarily JavaScript and PHP (no prior low level experience). Rust does have a steep learning curve, but I'd argue that it's shallower than that of C++ (which puts shoots up in complexity as soon as you wish to include a dependency). This is especially true if you are actually intending to write production code. There's no way I'd have comfortable releasing my C++ code to production after only 2 months, but my Rust code was completely solid despite my lack of experience in the language.