I’m genuinely curious to know is Rust over hyped?

>I’m genuinely curious to know why people seem to be obsessed with Rust

Because it's a C++ contender with equal speed, modern design, memory and race safety, good documentation, good basic tooling (production grade compiler, language server, great package manager and build tool), and major adoption (e.g. major app and infrastructure projects from Mozilla, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Google have been done with it).

Aside from the learning curve, and some areas its catching up necessarily (like package availability), what's not to like?

In any case, why don't you try it? It doesn't matter whether its hyped or not, what matters is if it fits or doesn't fit your use case.

You can find plenty of discussions about this point specifically, both on HN and elsewhere.

For me personally, what drew me to Rust is a strong type system with a good standard library, a friendly compiler that helps me understand what i did wrong (instead of letting me shoot myself in the foot), integrated modern tooling (offline docs, tests and doctests), and more generally the "we can have nice things" mindset.

Interesting also that Rust plays well both as high-level and low-level language. It's used for manually manipulating bits of memory on embedded controllers, but is also really good as a type-safe Python-like scripting language. The static type system allows you to jump at any between lower/higher levels of abstractions depending on what you need and want to do, usually without breaking anything (see also "fearless refactoring").

Rust is not superior to every language. It's got a bunch of tradeoffs. It's just rather good in many cases, and keeps on improving because it's developed by the community in the open not from an ivory tower disconnected from our problems.

From my perspective it is not Rust that is over hyped, but other languages are, like C++, where the good parts can be found only if you also accept the bad parts. Which are of course the ones one spends most time on, by far (intertwined as they are). Often one doesn't like to call the pile of shit that results by its proper name. Even less so when it pays the bills. If the language inventor wrote all programs (and the culture around the language), the language would have been fine! But shit happens. Rust might just be able to succeed because it clears exactly that (incredible) barrier.