Indeed. Rust is the only new contender in the field of systems programming, where C++ has to contend with decades of negative mindshare (C++11: "I've changed! I promise!"), and D, well, never really took off (because it started off in the early Internet era as a commercial compiler?).
There is also Zig, which seems nice as a C replacement but still highly unstable, and Jai, which is also a nice C replacement but currently has no publicly available compiler yet... So for the time Rust is the only new systems programming language (And please don’t say Go/Nim is a contender, they’re good languages in their own ways but having a garbage collector disqualifies it fron that categorization)
No language that drops C compatibility while having the same manual memory management is an actual contender.
Yes having a GC is a contender, because not all GCs are implemented the same way, and C did not eliminate Assembly as well.
So if a systems language, with GC, covers 95% of use cases. We can happily use something else for those remaining 5%, while enjoying better productivity and safety.
Companies like Astrobe manage to have enough customers to keep their Oberon compiler for bare metal deployments business alive, just as one possible example.
