Speaking as someone for whom programming is only ancillary to my job and who previously use python as my primary language, I wouldn't touch C/C++ with a 10-foot

Speaking as someone for whom programming is only ancillary to my job and who previously use python as my primary language, I wouldn't touch C/C++ with a 10-foot pole simply because I don't trust my own abilities to not screw it up and don't have the time to put into learning them to a level where I know I'm not. Things that Rust does that makes things easy for me as a less-experienced non-systems programmer: - very good documentation and compiler errors - cargo makes dependency management and distribution a breeze (big plus over python) - footguns are easily recognizable and avoided (unsafe) - strong typing allows me to express more invariants in the type system which makes my code easier to reason about (another big plus over python) The borrow checker can be an impediment at times and I'm probably leaving some performance at the door by generally avoiding references in data structures. I've found that this is less of a problem over time. It can also be way more verbose. But I have way more confidence that things will work at the end of the day, which makes it worthwhile for me, even if on the surface it is take longer and be harder to write than python.