Rust and productivity

It seems to be a popular opinion, even by some more experienced rust dev‘s to say that in terms productivity, especially in prototyping phases, rust is not up to par with other languages. Especially compared the garbage collected ones but I’ve heard the same thing about C and C++.

While that may very well be true if you write safe, idiomatic & performant rust, i feel like I can move just as fast in rust as in other languages if I write „dirty“ rust. Meaning I excessively use clone, unwrap or even unsafe to get things done until I have a more clear idea of the architecture. The added benefit is that you are very conscious about the technical debt your adding. Of course the cleanup has to come at some point but the same is true for „prototypy“ projects in other languages.

I’d love to hear some other takes on this!