My point is more that many rust programmers like rust because it’s an ML not because of the borrow checker. Most cli apps / web services are probably better off

My point is more that many rust programmers like rust because it’s an ML not because of the borrow checker. Most cli apps / web services are probably better off with a high performance managed runtime (go & swift are good examples of imperative languages that have successfully made similar tradeoffs). There do of course exist many important use cases where a better c++ is actually what you want, and the complexity tax of that is worth paying.