This makes me so excited! Great job to Alex and the entire team getting this done.

I know Rust is not the most perfect language for some. For me, it’s really exciting that there is finally a high level language which can scale for every potential use case.

Rust is great for kernels and the embedded space; Excels in the systems space; Is gaining traction in the native application space; Has great tooling for web backends; and, now, with WASM, it’s capable of targeting the web (Yes, without DOM access this is limited, but my understanding is that is coming at some point in the future).

Are there any other runtime free, memory safe languages that can target all of those use cases?

Rust is not really good for web backends, it has no library for talking to popular service, the construct for networking are still uncertain / unstable / hard to use.

https://rocket.rs/, https://rusoto.github.io/rusoto/rusoto_core/index.html, https://docs.rs/postgres/0.15.1/postgres/, https://docs.rs/kafka/0.7.0/kafka/, https://docs.rs/reqwest/0.8.1/reqwest/, as well as many other supporting libraries. I've not run into many things where there isn't already support.

Also, in terms of networking, if your doing blocking IO, the stdlib is fine. Otherwise, from my experience, I really like https://tokio.rs/ for non-blocking (I know people are torn on this one) and have used it in my DNS impl, https://github.com/bluejekyll/trust-dns

For more info on web and Rust, this is a great page: http://www.arewewebyet.org/