Embedded Rust in Production?

I recently finished a contract at a (very large game dev) company where some tools were written in Rust. The tools were a re-write of python scripts and added no new functionality but were slightly faster in Rust.

The reality was that these tools were unmaintainable by the rest of the company. Only the author "knew" Rust and it was hard to justify a new hire Rust developer to maintain this small set of tools.

The only reason these tools were written in Rust was because the dev wanted to learn Rust (a big but common mistake). I pointed out to the Technical Director that this was a big mistake and the teams had taken on a large amount of technical debt for no reason other than the ego of the wanna-be-rust-developer. Since I "knew" Rust he wanted me to maintain it. My advice was to go back to the Python scripts and I left.

Can I hire 1000 Rust devs at the drop of a hat off the street? Well, no. Have I ever struggled to find competent Rust devs, or high level people who were happy to learn? Nope.

I would absolutely not be afraid to use it because of “hiring concerns”. If your current devs can’t or won’t learn anything new, they’re not very good at their job. If you can’t or won’t hire because you can’t find a super-senior at the drop of a hat, well, your hiring process is broken and no language will really help there.