Unexpected productivity boost of Rust

Don't most of the benefits just come down to using a statically typed and thus compiled language? Be it Java, Go or C++; TypeScript is trickier, because it compiles to JavaScript and inherits some issues, but it's still fine.

I know that Rust provides some additional compile-time checks because of its stricter type system, but it doesn't come for free - it's harder to learn and arguably to read

> statically typed and thus compiled

Statically typed does not imply compiled. You can interpret a statically typed language, for instance. And not every compiled language is all that static.

For example, C is statically typed, but also has the ability to play pointer typecasting trickery. So how much can the compiler ever guarantee anything, really? It can't, and we've seen the result is brittle artifacts from C.

Rust is statically-typed and it has all kinds of restrictions on what you can do with those types. You can't just pointer cast one thing to another in Rust, that's going to be rejected by the compiler outright. So Rust code has to meet a higher bar of "static" than most languages that call themselves "static".

Type casting is just one way Rust does this, other ways have been mentioned. They all add up and the result is Rust artifacts are safter and more secure.