Comment by zozbot234

> see the async debacle and whatnot

The async featureset in Rust is far from complete, but async is also somewhat of a niche. You're not necessarily expected to use it, often you can just use threads.

> Zig is memory-safe enough in practice

Temporal safety is a huge deal, especially for the "programming in the large" case. Where unstated assumptions that are relied upon for the safety of some piece of code can be broken as some other part of the code evolves. The Rust borrow checker is great for surfacing these issues, and has very few practical alternatives.

> If we're limiting ourselves to systems languages, you still have a number of options like Ada and Coq.

It's easy to be "safe" if the equivalent to free() is marked as part of the unsafe subset, as with Ada. Coq is not very relevant on its own, though I suppose it could be part of a solution for proving the memory safety of C code. But this is known to be quite hard unless you do take your care to write the program in the "idiomatically safe" style that a language like Rust points you to.