Thanks, I actually researched and wrote the article largely to make sense of garbage collectors myself.

I don't have any personal experience with the kind of move you guys have done. Would be interesting to know more about that. I have often tried to sell places I worked at on using better languages. However I always fail at that ;-) How did you guys pull it off? What was the major selling point that won people over?

Also I'm curious about how people feel about working in a simpler lower level language? Aren't Java developers complaining about the language being too primitive?

I haven't spent a lot of time on Rust. I can't quite make up my mind. I think Rust has a lot of interesting ideas. But the dealbreaker for me is the complexity. C++ made me very negative towards complexity and seeing the cost of that. Rest seems to repeat too many C++ mistakes. Sure it is a clean slate and that is great. However the drive towards zero-cost abstractions combined with very strong type safety seems to really pile on the complexity and create really slow compilation times just like C++.

Because I value rapid iteration, I think having quick compilation times is very important.

I indirectly experienced Rust by using Swift. Swift has taken a lot of inspiration from Rust. It has a lower level memory management model. It has very strict tape safety. While I quite liked Swift, I also didn't like it. Once you get going it is fine. But when you step away from Swift code for a while and come back. I find it hard to pick up again. I suspect Rust is very similar.

I suspect if I was a younger developer I might have fancied Rust. I might've had more patience with learning the intricacies of the language. I cared more about things like game engines when I was younger and Rust seems like a pretty good language for building a game engine.