I don't think Rust is a lower-level language exactly, but it can be more cumbersome for high-level code than something like Python that has GC, duck-typing, and

I don't think Rust is a lower-level language exactly, but it can be more cumbersome for high-level code than something like Python that has GC, duck-typing, and short-hands for things like generators and list comprehension. For a web backend, I'd actually prefer NodeJS, but you mention a constrained environment and synchronization primitives, which both sound unusual for that application. When I used Rust, the entire purpose of the project was performance. It was a software-defined networking middlebox that's part of LTE networks. But we were doing FFI with C code. Rust was better for the larger concurrent pieces, but I still liked writing in C better for the fine-grained stuff (packet parsers etc).