So, is Rust a better C? I haven't dug into it too much but that's been my general impression of how it's been presented.
It's somewhat higher level than C.
I've always liked to think of myself as a programming polyglot, able to pick up and reason about nearly any standard language. I'm not sure how Rust is doing it, but the more I read and learn about it, the more confused I am. The syntax is just so bizarre and counter-intuitive to me. And yet I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn't "get" it. It's as if the language is being explicitly developed to be my kryptonite.
Rust seems to me much more like Haskell than C or C++. Try thinking about it that way and see if it makes more sense.
Interesting, that could well be it. Languages I pick up very easily (in rough order): C, C++, PHP, C#, Java, Scala, Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript, Lisp. Haskell is definitely one that gives me trouble as well. It's not the functional aspects: I've no trouble writing recursive descent parsers and the like in C++. I can't stand the parentheses, but I can understand and reason with Lisp.
I think in Haskell's case, it's just doing too much with too little. Like how they can implement quicksort in three short lines of code, and to me it's just so much to unroll in my head at once; but it's hard to be sure for obvious reasons.
1. Forget everything you know and follow the types.