I tried Rust about a month ago. The language itself is amazing, the pattern matching is super expressive, the borrow checker is incredible in the kinds of errors it can pick up on, and rust-analyzer is leagues beyond where RLS was. But... the compile times are an absolute non-starter for me. I'm the kind of guy that likes to re-run his code continually to see if it validates to what I expect it to be doing. In Rust, this kind of workflow just doesn't work at all. The long compile times completely kill any enjoyment or flow that I normally get out of productive programming. Even worse, I found myself anxious to introduce new dependencies, because each new crate would add a few more seconds to the compile time, which immediately correlates to less coding enjoyment.

I keep reading in Rust surveys that Rustaceans just don't care that much about compile times enough to prioritize improving them. I've often wondered how this can be possible, given that to me it's such an obvious glaring issue that all the other cited problems are distant distant seconds at best. I have a theory: there must be two groups of engineers. One group loves fast compile times and quickly validating hypotheses. The other group must value thinking about their code a lot more than running it, and so compile times aren't that important. My guess is that, while the second group hangs around and loves Rust, Rust has completely driven away the first group (including myself) to the degree that they don't use the language enough to even fill out the surveys.

Anyways, I know it has a wide swath of use cases, mostly in systems programming. I'm just bummed that if I ever do any of them, I won't really enjoy it. :-(

[EDIT:] Gotta go to sleep, it's far too late here. I really appreciate all the thoughtful replies. Rust's amazing community is another reason it annoys me that I can't fully get into the language as I'd like to.