Rust is interesting because it's the first language to really try to compete in the same space as C and C++ in quite a long time. Part of being a newer language

Rust is interesting because it's the first language to really try to compete in the same space as C and C++ in quite a long time. Part of being a newer language is that it doesn't have to work around the baggage of horribly bad past decisions (e.g., null-terminated strings, or implicit integer promotion). Part of it is also that it can adopt newer language features (e.g., structured binding or pattern matching) and have it mesh well with the language rather than having some weird workarounds. For many people, the most interesting aspect of Rust is that it builds into its type system a set of rules that makes it much more practical to avoid memory safety issues or concurrency issues--lifetimes and Send/Sync are an absolute godsend for such programming, especially because it means you get the compiler to kick you in the face when you screw it up. Rather famously, Mozilla attempted a couple of parallel layout engines in C++ but their attempts all failed, because it just wasn't feasible to shake out all of the concurrency issues; their first attempt at doing so in Rust had none of those issues. It's not that the rules are complicated or hard to follow, it's that in large codebases, the invariants you need to uphold are described only in comments and can be easy to forget.