I'm not quite sure there is that much overlap between Erlang/Elixir niche and Rust niche. You can certainly do "most" things with both but they will shine in di

I'm not quite sure there is that much overlap between Erlang/Elixir niche and Rust niche. You can certainly do "most" things with both but they will shine in different circumstances. You can certainly build anything with Rust, even an OS. And I guess this is where it will shine: system development, and very fast applications/tools. Erlang/Elixir is made to build fault-tolerant applications: think a service (which is really tens of thousands of micro-services all running in the Erlang VM), distributed on a cluster, that needs to run 24/7 without any interruption ever. Upgrading the app should not halt the system. A bug somewhere should not require you to restart the app: it should be limited in scope and you just hot patch it away. Erlang is fault tolerance is fault tolerance. From a Python/SQL background both will have a different set of challenges to learn: Erlang/Elixir means learning functional programming (no for loops, all map/reduce/filter and recursion), while Rust means learning how to handle references/memory ownership. To build webservices I'd give an edge to Elixir: cowboy + plug (+ phoenix). But that should be fun to build with Rust too... You should learn both :)