Sorry this is so long, I deleted many paragraphs. Something about this doesn't sound right to me. I think the third-party factors are overwhelming. After all,

Sorry this is so long, I deleted many paragraphs. Something about this doesn't sound right to me. I think the third-party factors are overwhelming. After all, the basic I/O and other low-level stuff is going to be there on any supported OS. But availability of compilers/VMs/interpreters, and good libraries for GL, Qt, audio, etc. are all at the top of my reasons for not going with a particular language that would otherwise be suited to the task. I think Rust is in a better position than one would normally expect. People are looking at it for web dev, and web devs tolerate more diversity in their language of choice. The existence of Go, and the frequent (if misguided) comparisons to Go helps, since writing a web-facing app in Go is a sensible thing. I'm not sure if that will work out, but if it does I think it's a trump card. No web language ever died, except things like Cold Fusion and languages that were superseded by offerings from their own vendors. On the other hand, I think Rust is better suited to game development. I don't know of Carmack being sweet on Rust in particular, but a few years ago he did start talking about how it would be nice if id could use safer languages (though his biggest complaint was about script writing.) More to the point, Rust is growing a collection of gamedev libraries. Piston is ambitiously trying to curate an entire ecosystem. This is a rare phenomenon among the pretenders. Piston is in no shape to take over the world today, but if it continues to grow and polish it could turn a number of heads.