Personally, I don't care about the pauses, I care about having a complex runtime.
Consider a widely deployed library written in C -- say, zlib or libjpeg or SQLite or openssl. Could you rewrite those in Go or Haskell or Scala? No. Because nobody wants a big surprise when linking a harmless C library all of a sudden brings in an entire GC that's starting extra threads, etc.
In other words, Rust is the first practical language in a long time that could be used for a new library that might be used in millions of different applications written in dozens of languages.
Consider a widely deployed library written in C -- say, zlib or libjpeg or SQLite or openssl. Could you rewrite those in Go or Haskell or Scala? No. Because nobody wants a big surprise when linking a harmless C library all of a sudden brings in an entire GC that's starting extra threads, etc.
In other words, Rust is the first practical language in a long time that could be used for a new library that might be used in millions of different applications written in dozens of languages.