I thought about trying it out in as small data engineering project, but I'm not sure if language support is sufficient for the kind of tooling I would need eg. Database adapters.
Or D, Nim, Swift, OCaml, Haskell, AOT C#, AOT Java,...
If any kind of automatic memory isn't possible/allowed, I would be reaching out for Rust, not a language that still allows for use-after-free errors.
Maybe it is a good language for those that would like to have Modula-2 with a C like syntax, and metaprogramming capabilities, and are ex-Objective-C developers.
I have come to the same conclusion but then I also fear that Rust will continue to expand in scope and become a monster language like C++. Do you or anyone fear that? Is that a possibility?
Will it turn into a C++-like monster? I don't know. Maybe, but when it comes to C++ it always feels like its "monster" status is largely a result of previous mistakes or early design decisions piling up, and causing trouble (eg. C-style arrays, exceptions, implicit conversions, fiddly sum types rather than first class support, no pattern matching etc.).
Rust will grow large, and probably complicated, but the real issue with C++ are all these past mistakes and a shaky foundation, and Rust is doing much, much better in that regard. Time will tell if we'll eventually look back some of Rust's design decisions as bad or unwieldy (probably).
As for lifetimes, what's the issue? Do you have any reason to believe lifetimes are frustrating because they were badly designed, rather than the fact that they're making complexity explicit which was previously hidden?