Perhaps you are right that I am painting HN with too broad a brush. I do see some good points made scatteringly in this discussion, such as yours.
On Rust, and also this project (I believe the following point is mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well): There's one thing I don't get about the whole thing. People who want a low-level language with lots of control have C and C++. People who want a high-level language with GC etc. have lots of options today as well. So, why Rust, and why this MS project? C and C++ have faults but the people who care about them are well aware; if nothing else they are a known quantity. People who don't care about any of this will just pick the higher-level stuff.
I guess I'll have to try one of these languages out to form a better opinion.
Because before C became widespread, there were languages that allowed the same type of systems programming while allowing safer coding, like Modula-2.
C's widespread made systems open to buffer and pointer misuse exploits, patched by external tooling and multiple attempts at OS levels. All of them still far away from the desired outcome.
I can only speak for Rust, but Rust does actually give you the flexibility and unsafety of C, but this is an escape hatch; you can write most of your program with the memory and data race safety that Rust provides, only dropping down to the super-low-level C-like code when absolutely necessary.
I.e. you can rely on the compiler to verify most of your code, only the explicit `unsafe` blocks (which are normally very rare, especially with some considered abstractions that keep all the unsafety in one place) absolutely need auditing for things like buffer overflow and use-after-free (unlike C/C++ where any code in the whole codebase can have these problems).
On Rust, and also this project (I believe the following point is mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well): There's one thing I don't get about the whole thing. People who want a low-level language with lots of control have C and C++. People who want a high-level language with GC etc. have lots of options today as well. So, why Rust, and why this MS project? C and C++ have faults but the people who care about them are well aware; if nothing else they are a known quantity. People who don't care about any of this will just pick the higher-level stuff.
I guess I'll have to try one of these languages out to form a better opinion.