> Indeed. And when that "right answer" comes along, it tends to swipe away everything else. If it's universally better, why wouldn't it?

> Except that, Rust does not do that. Which is a hint that it's not an "universally right answer", but a right answer for a subdomain of problems. That's basically what I was trying to say. That it does come with its own tradeoffs/downsides.

Rust may not be the only right answer, but memory unsafety is the wrong one. New projects overwhelmingly pick memory-safe languages, governments and organisations are banning memory-unsafe languages at least for new projects. I don't think anyone is picking C++ at this point if they don't already have a big sunk cost invested in it (even if that cost is just their personal programming experience).

> Lifetime annotations are not yet adopted by any other mainstream language, AFAIK

Linear Haskell is getting there, but most languages aren't flexible enough to retrofit lifetimes (or at best it would be a multi-year effort, like adding types to Python) - as we're seeing in this whole C++ discussion. Also non-GC languages are niche in the first place, and the problem lifetimes solve is a lot less urgent in a GC language. I don't think any post-Rust language has hit "mainstream" yet (we only really get a couple of new mainstream languages a decade), so we'll see what happens in the future.