Another commenter mentioned the NSA and safe languages, which is what prompted our move...

...and I have to say, Rust is fantastic. I was reading the O'Reilly book when I was doing some gnarly three-star C work and I kept thinking that it would likely be far easier and safer in Rust.

We're now at the point where all new work is Rust and that gnarly, performant AF piece of C that just flies will be replaced with a simpler, safer Rust version.

Another commenter mentioned speed of prototyping. That was a concern for me, too, but so far real life has shown me the opposite: prototyping is only slightly slower, mostly because I am having to learn various Crates instead of using system calls and their libc variants I've known for years, but incremental debelopment from proto to poc to mvp to product is faster because there is far less dumb at each step: if it built, it is safe(r) to extend.

Maybe it is because so much of what we do is low level high performance system programming, I dunno, but, after 37 years, I may soon have invoked a C compiler for the last time.