&gt; Its hard to beat C++ when it comes to performance (while still having high level abstractions).<p>Re: performance, Rust&#x27;s doing pretty well (on a bunch of arbitrary microbenchmarks):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org&#x2F;u64q&#x2F;compare.php?lang=rust&amp;lang2=gpp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org&#x2F;u64q&#x2F;compare.php?la...</a><p>Re: high level abstractions, Rust doesn&#x27;t have many of the template shenanigans C++ does (but that&#x27;s a good thing, IMHO). However Rust does have a phenomenal type system for a language with such predictable and solid performance. And it has many wonderful high-level abstractions (exhaustive pattern matching on algebraic data types, iterator syntax for collections, many functional idioms, an AST-based macro system, etc.).<p>&gt; If something is going to kill C++, its probably a language that scales very well to multicore.<p>Rust has fantastic concurrency, and the libraries for it are still in relative infancy. The type system keeps un-synchronized shared mutable state from happening (unless you intentionally turn off certain checks using unsafe code, IIRC). There are freely available libraries for lock-free data structures and stack-scoped threads. As an aside, it&#x27;s also really easy to use those libraries without having to vendor some random header files that may or may not conform to your coding style.<p>&gt; Maybe a functional language. I be happy if that happened as that would be a revolutionary breakthrough.<p>Rust also has some pretty cool functional syntax, although I&#x27;m not an expert on functional programming, I&#x27;ve been enjoying it quite a bit.<p>&gt; About the aliasing problem. I&#x27;m not sure how it could detect that either.<p>Not sure how C++ intends to do it, but Rust does it with a strict ownership system that is fully enforced at compile time.