Memory safety is still good for long term code maintenance and refactorability. wycats also mentions that these processes are reasonably long lived - memory leaks can become a big problem over time if you are not careful. These can be mostly purged by static analysis and Valgrind, but are still a headache to deal with. I would also add that Rust is much easier to hack on safely if you don't have a great deal of prior systems programming experience.