[anextio]

> mainstream compilers provide support to detect and throw warnings/errors for some of these issues

You cannot detect all of these issues with static analysis. Rust does it by requiring the programmer to annotate lifetime dependencies in the source code. Without this additional semantic information, static analysis cannot fully reason about the lifetimes of variables.

There are efforts by some to introduce lifetime annotations to C++ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30888172), but any changes to the core language face a very steep uphill battle with the C++ standards committee, so any movement on this is likely to be compiler-specific attribute-based systems, adopted largely by companies invested in a particular compiler ecosystem (such as Apple or Google) to annotate their proprietary code.

On top of this, Rust is a very expressive language, with its features (like enum sum-types, traits etc) making it very easy to implement patterns such as compiler-checked state machines and polymorphism that doesn't involve the recognized downsides of class hierarchies.

It is not for everyone, and not for every kind of project, but its features resonate positively with a lot of people in systems programming because of their experiences with other systems languages and their downsides.

This is why Rust is popular today, particularly in certain communities.