If you’re a safe c++ programmer who never writes code that has memory errors, you need to be tracking ownership and lifetimes.
Once you get your head around the borrow checker, Rust takes a lot of that cognitive load off you, by tracking things for you at compile time and dinging you on it if you get something wrong.
Rust imposes a lot more constraints than just what is needed to make it safe. It imposes constraints to make it provably safe according to Rust's internal theorem prover.
I'm not convinced Rust & C++ have as much in common as you think. Rust is really familar to OCaml or Haskell users.
