The disparity between Rust jobs and C/C++/C#/Java/Golang jobs on Indeed is staggering. Even worse, most of the Rust jobs are blockchain-related and may not survive the coming blockchain downturn.
It may be the case that some people use Rust but without Rust jobs, there will be no pool of experienced developers to later draw on.
I think there is a space for other alternative low-level languages that aren't that strict about compile-time safety though (Zig, Jai, Odin), that Rust cannot capture.
Many proclaim that compile-time safety using type theory is the only way to create reliable low-level software, but I think it can alternatively be done with good data structure design and various compiler tooling that instead catch these errors at runtime (generational indices/references, Address Sanitizer, and recently Zig's safety mode). We need to explore multiple directions to really solve the memory safety problem, and I don't think Rust is the only way (although it is a viable way, proven by some recent successful applications).
You can even get safety using logic without the compiler. I think resource cleanup responsibility tracking as a static analysis tool is likely to happen with some of these languages. I think zig is a good candidate, once they lock down the intermediate representation.
It's already the case that people are using "logic add-ons" for additional rust static analysis, so one wonders exactly why is it generally speaking that borrow checking itself must occur at the compilation step.
Trivially, one could create an annotation layer on top of zig or c that exactly replicates the rust syntax and performance borrow checking in the same way. It wouldn't be exactly the same because there isn't RAII but you can make correct inferences about what is happening in the body of the functions.
Rust will not accomplish this without significant language changes as well as changing cargo into something a lot more cooperative with external ecosystems.
Zig is getting an absolutely enormous boost from the fact that it is a self-contained C ecosystem that can cooperate with others. Zig has tripped into a very powerful niche--a lot of people LOATHE the build systems of the C/C++ world. If Zig gains very much more traction there, it's going to be extremely hard to dislodge.
I suspect that there are FAR more users of "Zig as C build system" than there are of "Zig as a language".
But cargo already isn’t in Rust. There are AFAIK no cargo-specific concepts that have leaked into Rust, the language. It is very straightforward to build Rust code without using cargo, for example with a makefile.
The reason other tools are slow to add support for rust is because cargo is so ubiquitous in the rust ecosystem that there is little point (I’d estimate that >99% of Rust code is built using Cargo), and not because of any technical impossibility.
