I'd say Rust is a generically sensible language, in terms of the modern state of the art of language design (that is to say, it has a powerful but lightweight type system and is designed in ways that are amenable to writing correct programs) - this sounds like a low bar but is surprisingly rare (at least for a language that qualifies as at all mainstream). Distinctive things are that it compiles to native code and has manual but safe memory management (i.e. you have to tell it what the lifetimes of your values are, unlike a garbage-collected language, but you'll get compilation errors if you do it wrong, rather than silent memory leaks or crashes).

It's a reasonable first choice for when you absolutely need to avoid GC, or need code without a runtime (e.g. for embedding into another language). IMO a lot of people overestimate their performance requirements though (or assume that all GC languages must be as slow as Python/Ruby, or as slow to start as Java), and would be more productive overall writing in a language that doesn't require manual memory management and then spending a little time profiling. So for general-purpose programming where the target is native code I would recommend starting with OCaml or Haskell (if VM languages are suitable then also consider F# or Scala), and only falling back to Rust if you've spend a bit of time profiling and optimizing your app (or a representative benchmark/example) and find you really can't get the performance you absolutely need.