I also forsee a significant speedup in complex applications caused by programmers being more free to do pointer gymnastics because they know that there won't be

I also forsee a significant speedup in complex applications caused by programmers being more free to do pointer gymnastics because they know that there won't be use after free or anything (as compared to using refcounting everywhere or a GC). (http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/03/where-rust-really-shines/ http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/03/where-rust-real... has an example for others reading this thread)