Programming

1. If your alternative is C++ then it removes the enormous burden of manually tracking lifetimes and doing manual memory management. C++ does have RAII which helps with that enormously but even then there are a gazillion footguns that Rust just doesn't have - especially with the newer stuff like rvalue references, std::move, coroutines etc. It also saves you from C++'s dreaded undefined behaviour which is everywhere.

2. It has a very strong (and nicely designed) type system which gives an "if it compiles it works" kind of feel, similar to FP languages like Haskell (so they say anyway; I've not used it enough to know). The borrow checker strongly pushes you to write code in a style that somehow leads to less buggy code. More compiler errors, but much less debugging and fixing bugs.

3. The libraries and APIs are generally very well designed and nice to use. If you've ever used Dart or Go think how nice the standard library is compared to JavaScript or PHP. It took C++ like 2 decades to get string::starts_with but Rust started with it (and much more!).

4. Fast by default.

5. Modern tooling. No project setup hassle.

6. It's a value based language, not reference based. References are explicit unlike JavaScript, Java, C#, etc. This is much nicer and makes things like e.g. copying values a lot easier. JavaScript's answer for ages was "serialise to JSON and back" which is crazy.

Downsides:

1. Slow compilation sometimes. I'd say it's on par with C++ these days.

2. Async Rust is kind of a mess. They shipped an MVP and it's still kind of hard to use and has unexpected footguns, which is a shame because sync Rust avoids footguns so well. Avoid async Rust if you can. Unfortunately sometimes you can't.

3. Interop with C++ is somewhat painful because Rust doesn't have move constructors.

Great language overall. Probably the best at the moment.