I agree the type system is the best feature of Rust but neither Ruby or Elixir have the level of type safety and type expressiveness of Rust. I'd recommend Has

I agree the type system is the best feature of Rust but neither Ruby or Elixir have the level of type safety and type expressiveness of Rust. I'd recommend Haskell as an alternative, but Rust "fixes" plenty of long term Haskell annoyances (especially around laziness by default, concurrency, unsafe std). Being able to use Arc<Mutex<T>>, Rc<RefCell<T>> and other smart pointers gives you granularity and control over what happens to your memory. I think it's a nice feature to have to mentally reason about your memory usage (incidentally a weak point in Haskell); even if it were on-par with a GC implementation-wise, why use a GC over this? I like to have control over my code (and I'm probably one of the few who think monad transformers in haskell were a good feature - despite their clunkiness) and I'd pick explicit code over "magic garbage collection in the background" any day. This is not to say I like verbosity for verbosity's sake (eg. think React Redux in JS vs the implementation of the same idea in Elm) but in some cases I think it's justified and it brings extra value.