Comment by speedstyle

I for one don't care about memory safety. Rust makes it easier to compose software by expressing everything in your function/module signature. This is what OOP aimed to do, but was quite prescriptive (a datatype often isn't the natural unit of encapsulation). It maximizes local reasoning, so you can make changes to a large codebase with less understanding of uses elsewhere, and reuse functionality in new ways without changes.

C#, Go, Swift are (mostly) memory safe, but I don't think they provide this level of modularity or broader reliability. Expressive interfaces/contracts are useful for all sorts of things, you can use them for memory management but for me that's almost a by-product. I certainly don't consider it a restriction on the kinds of program you can write