I've been thinking about this more, so I have a few more thoughts. Rust's compile-time memory safety guarantees are _the_ feature to beat. I've spent a large part of 2016 exploring Rust, and I hate it, but, the compile-time memory safety is such a compelling feature, I'll suffer through it and keep using it. Even [Swift is planning something Rust-like in v4.0](https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution).
Would there be any advantage implementing a Nim backend in Rust maintaining all of Nim's features? I'll argue "yes". If the implementation pendantically avoided Rust's [unsafe](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html) feature, one could guarantee (at least in as much as Rust can make such gurantees) that if their code compiled, their code would be memory-safe. That's worth it, in my opinion. I do have to admit, however, that I don't know to what extent Nim already provides such gurantees. It would introduce a number of unfortunate disadvantages. To name two: Probably less performance than the C backend, and very slow compile times.
