...but I mean, even if we accept that the things you say about clojurescript are true (and I don't agree that they are, but even if I did), the point I'm making is that it doesnt stand out from the crowd in terms of features.
Nothing you've described is something that would be missed particularly using say, typescript, webpack and npm.
I hear this a lot from the clojure community... but I think it's a missed attempt to pivot off the JVM and have clojure be useful for more people on a more popular platform.
Missed?
Yes.
Pick a thing.
Be excellent at it.
What is clojurescript excellent at?
Its a nice language, with not very nice tooling, that is hard to maintain and significantly different from the existing javascript code base you already have, with poor interop to the existing js ecosystem (it is poor, compared to some other compile to js languages).
On the JVM, java sucks, but your choices are limited; what, maybe groovy, kotlin, scale, clojure?
Clojure has pride of place as the best dynamic language in that space.
For javascript, that crowd of alternatives is so much larger, clojurescript needs to actually be good to stand out amongst all the others.
...and I don't think it really does.
The people who use it seem to just like it as a language; and I get that, that's a thing.
...but aesthetics are personal preference and its difficult to ague they make a compelling use case.
Rust certainly isn't one of those languages where you can just pick it up, play with it for a day implementing an algorithm in it to get the feel of it and learn 'the complicated stuff' later.
Other languages let you get away with that quick start style; you can write a lot of python before you need to write a plugin, and a lot of c# before you start using unsafe code, etc.
Rust doesn't afford you that luxury.
Lifetimes, mutability and single ownership are BAM, right in your face from the start.
It probably puts a few people off... but hey, you know the analogy about tools and toolboxes.
Rust is for writing fast, secure, cross platform code. There's nothing else out there that offers the same; it's not a case of use Rust or Nim, or C++; rust is literally the only language that offers these features right now.
You can certainly write code that happens to be secure, fast and cross platform (eg. in C++), and if you don't need those features (or dont care), you're almost certainly better off picking a different language (like Go or Nim) that are 'fast enough' and 'secure enough', and don't restrict you in the same way Rust does, or something far more productive (like python or javascript) if all you need to do is smash out a product.
That's perfectly ok.
We don't need a language which is everything for everyone all at the same time.
Rust is very good at doing what it does; and it's the first time C++ has had a real challenger. I, for one, am really looking forward to the dynamics between the two crowds going forwards.
(the clojurescript is now considered 'legacy')