Theres a huge gap between inefficient and unusable. There’s a lot of usable code out there that leaks memory. I’d argue compilers are hardly pressed by memory usage given the transient nature of their execution.
Saying rust is unusable is pretty extreme. Tons of serious applications and infrastructure have been using it in production for years generating lots of money and preventing CVEs.
Leaking memory is sometimes not a huge issue. Missile allocation is real. Undefined behaviour, seg faults, data races, etc from edge cases slow down development.
The promise of rust isn't that it's super fast to learn but once you have you never deal with a swath of issues ever again.
And that's speaking from a deficit. Rust is an excellent language to do language development. It has arguably the best tooling for it in the ecosystem in my opinion and a vibrant community for it. Some of the most recent languages have foundations in rust. That is likely to continue going forward.
