Another aspect that makes me hopeful about Rust as a way forward for C++ programmers is that it is designed to play well with the C (if not C++) ecosystem. Go

Another aspect that makes me hopeful about Rust as a way forward for C++ programmers is that it is designed to play well with the C (if not C++) ecosystem. Go is in this weird place where they insist that you have to be 100% Go or not at all, at least with the official Go package (gccgo is different, but this divergence in the ecosystem doesn't exactly inspire confidence). This is convenient when you have small isolated processes, but completely prevents Go adoption in other environments. I'm working in an electronic design automation software system which is basically a large number of C/C++ shared libraries/plugins loaded into a Tcl interpreter which you do not want to rewrite (lots of tricky and finely tuned optimization and design analysis algorithm). Go is not a good fit in this environment because of its all-or-nothing attitude. Rust, on the other hand, is fairly easy to imagine as an addition to the toolset from a purely technological point of view (ignoring the social and management issues which add a huge amount of inertia). There is an unfortunate impedance mismatch between idiomatic C++ and idiomatic Rust, but communication is possible via a thin C interface.