It's a very interesting phenomenon in recent years and most of the discussions about "why" are immediately blocked by the "memory safety" argument, as if it's a silver bullet for all things that are considered "bad" in software implementations. No matter how good the language is, and I consider Rust a very good language, it's practically impossible to replace years of experience and tested code, most of it contributed by a ton of brilliant programmers, no matter how you look at it. And if we take this as the truth, then logically there's still an unanswered question - why? Lets take an undeniable fact - rewriting an existing project give you full control over the new implementation. You can do whatever you want with it, you can't be sued. The only thing now you have to hope for is for your implementation to gather a good enough user base and from then on you can practically hijack the original project. And this is me speculating - rewriting stuff in Rust isn't about the greater good for that magical "memory safety" argument, but at the end it's an attempt to hijack popular software projects.