I'm not arguing that there isn't a gain here, but GP's original assertion was that
> While programming in Rust, I've never thought to myself, "man, this would be so much easier to express in C++".
This is a concrete example of something that is much easier to express in C++. And, sure, you do pay the tax for that (although I will also dispute the notion that it is impossible to write C++ without memory bugs; it's just hard).
I guess this is a semantics argument, but I assume they mean to express the same thing with same (or reasonably same) security guarantees. After all, the security and "bug freeness" is part of what they are expressing. If you attempt to create something reasonably similar to Rust, you do suddenly need a lot of complex checking code and maybe tests for things that were trivial in Rust (because the compiler does the tests for you).
> While programming in Rust, I've never thought to myself, "man, this would be so much easier to express in C++".
This is a concrete example of something that is much easier to express in C++. And, sure, you do pay the tax for that (although I will also dispute the notion that it is impossible to write C++ without memory bugs; it's just hard).