What do people love about Rust?

Rust has been named Stack Overflow's Most Loved (now called Most Admired) language every year since our 1.0 release in 2015. That means people who use Rust want to keep using Rust 1 --and not just for performance-heavy stuff or embedded development, but for shell scripts, web apps, and all kinds of things you wouldn't expect. One of our participants captured it well when they said, "At this point, I don't want to write code in any other language but Rust." When we sat down to crunch the vision doc data, one of the things we really wanted to explain was: What is it that inspires that strong loyalty to Rust? 2 Based on the interviews, the answer is at once simple and complicated. The short version is that Rust empowers them to write reliable and efficient software . If that sounds familiar, it should: it's the slogan that we have right there on our web page . The more interesting question is how that empowerment comes about, and what it implies for how we evolve Rust. What do people appr