Sure, we have the same understanding of what's going on in each situation. But I can't see how anyone could call the Rust version as simple as C/C++. There ar

Sure, we have the same understanding of what's going on in each situation. But I can't see how anyone could call the Rust version as simple as C/C++. There are simply more concepts involved. You can try to cover them up with magic code generators and version wrappers, but in my experience those are precisely the leaky abstractions that make people scared of FFI. They work 99% of the time, then bite you 1% of the time. The built-in Python FFI is somewhat ugly, but simple and debuggable. I'm not saying you shouldn't use Rust for Python extensions -- just that there is an inherent awkwardness in doing so, given that Python is written in C, and the Python 2.x has no stable ABI. Of course Rust offers benefits, so if you want to pay the cost for those benefits, it might be worth it.