Rust – Compile Time Memory Safety
The author says that this is "why Rust is interesting".  I've done a little bit with Rust -- no production code, but some simulations and things like that.  While compile time memory safety was the first thing to interest me in Rust, I don't even think it's the primary selling point anymore.  The selling point to me is that nearly everything behaves in predictable ways.<p>E.g. since immutable references are the default, you immediately know whether or not a call will modify its argument.  E.g. the existence of traits and compiler warnings for style mean that method naming conventions are incentivized, because implementing a trait usually gives you a lot for free.  Even performance characteristics are very predictable, a statement which I can only otherwise make about C and assembly (and those are not predictable at all in other ways).<p>Yes, the memory safety does play into this.  It's much more than that, though:  memory safety is just one factor in a kind of pervasive predictability that the language encourages through its very design.