The second ever (that we know of) use of Rust in production is by Tilde, who are using Rust embedded in Ruby for Skylight to help ensure that memory usage stays down and to get more consistent performance. Garbage collection while doing performance monitoring is bad news.
I think that it's possible that Rust might eventually be useful as an application level language. We'll see how it shakes out. We've been in love with scripting languages for the past few years, but now their drawbacks are becoming more apparent. Look at all the Rubyists and Pythonistas flocking to Go, for example...
I'm not entirely sure yet. I wrote another post that touches on this: http://words.steveklabnik.com/rust-is-surprisingly-expressiv...
I think that it's possible that Rust might eventually be useful as an application level language. We'll see how it shakes out. We've been in love with scripting languages for the past few years, but now their drawbacks are becoming more apparent. Look at all the Rubyists and Pythonistas flocking to Go, for example...
Interesting times indeed.