If you look at the history of languages and impact they made, Rust doesn't really fit into any one.
C was influential because it had very concise grammar which made it fairly easy to adapt to any architecture. C++ on the other hand never really gained as much traction despite its apparent advantages.
Java, being fairly poorly designed in early days (unpredictable GC, needing a class wrapper for main) got huge adoption because it was cross platform and programmers didn't have to manage memory manually.
Javascript won over PHP because of its flexibility, despite of all its shortcomings.
Python won over Ruby and others for scientific computing because of its great standard library, that made development super easy, dependency management (especially with venv) and very easy integration with native code. Even now, for companies, its actually cheaper to spend more on extra infra to run slower python code than pay programmers to write it in a higher performance language.
What does Rust have? Primarily memory safety, and then slightly better code structure compared to C, and cargo package manager. Memory safety doesn't really map onto a real world result. The task of exploiting binaries is EXTREMELY difficult these days with so many layers of protection just to get to the binary over the internet with your structure shellcode, never mind exfiling data. Cargo package manager is fairly good for what it is. Code structure can be clearer to read compared to C (you can get fairly close if you know how to write C macros well).
So overall, its still very niche, and the reference tracking acts as a disadvantage to slow development down. Sure it forces you to think about structure, but the future is looking like that computers are going to do all that thinking for you (or rather apply known memory safe patterns to your code automatically).
C was influential because it had very concise grammar which made it fairly easy to adapt to any architecture. C++ on the other hand never really gained as much traction despite its apparent advantages.
Java, being fairly poorly designed in early days (unpredictable GC, needing a class wrapper for main) got huge adoption because it was cross platform and programmers didn't have to manage memory manually.
Javascript won over PHP because of its flexibility, despite of all its shortcomings.
Python won over Ruby and others for scientific computing because of its great standard library, that made development super easy, dependency management (especially with venv) and very easy integration with native code. Even now, for companies, its actually cheaper to spend more on extra infra to run slower python code than pay programmers to write it in a higher performance language.
What does Rust have? Primarily memory safety, and then slightly better code structure compared to C, and cargo package manager. Memory safety doesn't really map onto a real world result. The task of exploiting binaries is EXTREMELY difficult these days with so many layers of protection just to get to the binary over the internet with your structure shellcode, never mind exfiling data. Cargo package manager is fairly good for what it is. Code structure can be clearer to read compared to C (you can get fairly close if you know how to write C macros well).
So overall, its still very niche, and the reference tracking acts as a disadvantage to slow development down. Sure it forces you to think about structure, but the future is looking like that computers are going to do all that thinking for you (or rather apply known memory safe patterns to your code automatically).