One big advantage of rust is that (while some people won't like this), rust assumes you won't install it from your package manager, but download a script which installs it in your home directory. This script is quick and easy.

Trying to install a c++ compiler from source (and I've done it several times) is a much less plesent experience, so most people stick with what their package manager provides.

Language features aside, Rust is a lot nicer to work with because it has cargo and using libraries is no longer a pain.

That's part of it, but more generally, Rust prioritizes fitting into other programs: it offers direct compatibility with the C ABI for functions and structs (because the C ABI is the effective lingua franca for ~all present-day OSes), it uses regular C-style stacks instead of segmented stacks, threading is implicit, calls between Rust and C in either direction are just regular function calls and involve no trampolines or special handling by the GC/runtime, there is no runtime that requires initialization so you can just call into a random Rust function from a C program without setup, etc.

Go has cgo, and has slowly come to a few of the same decisions (e.g., Go gave up on segmented stacks too), and gccgo exists, so it's certainly possible to use Go for this use case. But it's not as suited as Rust.

There's a nice post about calling Rust from Go which goes to lengths to avoid the cgo overhead, even though Rust can just directly expose C-compatible functions and cgo can call them without any special effort on either side: https://blog.filippo.io/rustgo/

> How so? Is it because Go has a GC and Rust doesn't?

More generally a heavy runtime, which creates issues when you're trying to replace parts of a process which has its own runtime, unless you can make the two cooperate (by actually using the same runtime e.g. jvm or graal or whatever).

Go's FFI is also easy to work with but the source of… other issues which is why the Go community often prefers reimplementing things entirely to using cgo and existing native libraries.

Yes, manually move objects between GCs is tricky.

Really? The only reason?