So you are very careful not to depend on any of their toxic complex features. In the end, better not use them at all.

Even plain and simple C99 compilers can be reasonably written by a solo dev, so a motivated small team...

I do depend on their features, and I see the value in doing that.

For example, at $WORK I had to reimplement Apache's mod_rewrite.c in Rust, and I made it 100x faster for our particular use-case.

I could've done that in C as well, sure, but the simplicity of the C language just moves the complexity to the code itself; whereas, with Rust, I whipped out a prototype in just 3 days, and was able to freely pass around pointers to data, with zero allocations, zero copying, and every time it compiled I knew it was guaranteed to be safe.

You can't get that safety in C. You can't get that speed in Java.

You can't do this in any other language that does not have these features. I absolutely agree that the syntax is horrible... but I see no other way to achieve this.

I severely disagree, this is quite short sighted.

The obscene complexity of the rust language (like c++) makes a toolchain beyond anything reasonable to code alternatives: that reason alone is sufficient to avoid it.

You can have as many "features" you want, the anti-feature of absurd/grotesque syntax complexity _alone_ buries it.

There is nothing more to say or argue about. This is dead simple.

We will have to agree to disagree, then.

Indeed, but with a major difference:

Your side has a significantly higher cost technical dependency than we don't have.