> From my vantage point, when something does a great job at solving a problem better than everything else nobody spends their days trying to read about it, everyone quietly starts using it.

Funny you should say this. 4 of the last 5 companies I've worked at have quietly been using Rust in small but key parts of their systems. As far as I know, no one outside of those companies ever publicized it. They adopted it organically and kept it around because it kept working.

Everyone loves to whine about the Rust Evangelism Strike Force but the amount of "quiet Rust" out in the wild is a lot larger than most people would guess.

What is that emotional longing, exactly? I don't really know.

First, to be honest about my own feelings toward Rust: as you know, Rust's traits feel like a mix of Haskell's typeclasses and OOP, and that mashup of multiple languages just didn't click with me. I'm not a fan of solving compiler puzzles either. Especially when I've used AI to generate Rust code, it produced a lot of bad code relying heavily on clone, so it's not a language I'm particularly fond of.

In that sense, I do understand part of what you're saying. I suppose this is exactly the "emotional longing that isn't being satisfied by the technical reality" you mentioned.

So then why does the community keep holding Rust up as this symbol?

That's the hard part. Rust's promise is solving undefined behavior. But UB has already been largely solved by GC languages too. So what is it about Rust that pulls people in? Is it because it replaces C and C++, the oldest legacy in programming? Or is it because it's hard for a new superstar to emerge within the legacy that C and C++ created, so people are drawn to Rust as a fresh language? I really don't know. It's a tough question.