Yeah, and a ton of people still complain about having to put their seat belt on in the car too.

No, the point is that Rust does not replace C. At best, it’s “safe C++” (and even that’s debatable, given the cyclic references issue discussed here). But for the use cases where even C++ is too much, there is no replacement for C.

Zig aspires to be that minimal language. It seems to have a lot of really good ideas. It’s too bad the compiler is so opinionated that a lot of developers will be alienated by it.

> No, the point is that Rust does not replace C. At best, it’s “safe C++”.

This is a meaningless distinction. No language in the history of languages has ever strictly "replaced" another. Over time Rust will eat into the market share of every language to differing amounts. C and C++ top the list of languages that Rust will likely eat into the most, but of course they will still continue to exist and people will find reasons to continue using them.

> But for the use cases where even C++ is too much, there is no replacement for C.

Rust is a significantly less complicated language than C++. But what does this even mean, anyway? Whose use-case is "A systems programming language, but the spec can only be so many pages long?"

> (and even that’s debatable, given the cyclic references issue discussed here)

    struct Node<T> {
        data: T,

        left:   *mut Node<T>,
        right:  *mut Node<T>,
        parent: *mut Node<T>,
    }

Wow, so difficult! If the comparison is C, I don't even have to bother writing a safe abstraction around this.