It is used in industry, with caveats. You often see both C++ and Rust in the same company as complementary languages. In my experience, the biggest issue is th

It is used in industry, with caveats. You often see both C++ and Rust in the same company as complementary languages. In my experience, the biggest issue is that it is nearly impossible find experienced Rust developers who are also domain experts for systems software. A common pattern I see is that people with Rust experience have almost no real systems software or other systems language experience, so the Rust developer pool tends to be quite junior in terms of relevant domain experience where C++ is the dominant language. Ideally, you want someone who was doing systems development in C++ for many years -- it is the only way to realistically have the domain expertise -- that then became an expert in the Rust language. These exist but are very rare. As a consequence of this, another pattern I've seen is that a lot of the Rust development is moving a bit further up the stack, where the JVM commonly lives, because it is a better match for the domain experience of Rust software devs in practice. Rust has significant advantages relative to Java in many regards. I think Rust is quite brilliant in this role but that isn't how it is commonly positioned. My controversial view is that Rust is more likely to replace Java than C++, and is significantly more competitive against Java than C++.