I first got into Rust because a professor suggested writing an OS kernel in it as an interesting exercise. As a systems programmer, I came to really appreciate Rust because of it's safety guarantees, having spent a lot of time with C and C++. I still primarily think of Rust as a "systems language", even though that not what I primarily use it for.
Over time, I found myself primarily using Rust for:
- hobby OS kernels
- hobby distributed systems
- CLI tools for use at work (this one kind of surprised me, but Rust is really good at it).