> GCed languages aren't (usually) more memory safe than safe Rust because they (usually) lack the equivalent to the Send and Sync traits and thus will not prevent unsynchronized access to the same from multiple threads, including data races.

To be honest that particular aspect of Rust's memory safety story slipped my mind when I wrote that comment. I was thinking of Java's upcoming (?) disabling-by-default of sun.misc.Unsafe which allows you to ensure that you have no unsafe code at all in your program and your dependency tree outside of the JVM itself. To be fair, that's admittedly not quite the same level of memory safety improvement over Rust as Rust/Java/C#/etc. over C/C++/etc., but I felt it's a nice guarantee to have available.

> Guaranteed thread safety is huge.

I totally agree! It's not the only way to get memory safety, but I definitely lean towards that approach over defining data races to be safe.