Last semester, I took a grad class where I had a project to optimize across a very high dimensional space (many hundreds if not thousands).

I implemented the algorithm using numpy, and I suppose it was functional, but it took to long. My algorithm was never really able to converge to a good solution. I got maybe 2 orders of magnitude speedup by numba-ing the critical parts, but it still was awefully slow.

Some of my classmates used C. I know C, its just...it's dated. I knew that for what I wanted to do, I didn't want to gdb all the time and deal with allocating and deallocating memory manually, and remember whether it was const int * or int const *.

Rust seems to be catching on for systems programming. From what I have seen, I like how it is the language specification (and the compiler) that prevents you from doing something stupid, rather than just getting a seg fault and wonder what' going on.

Does anyone have experience with rust? What do you use it for? What do you like? Dislike? Did it replace use of another language or tool?