So many ways it's hard to list them. Better tooling, type system, libraries, language features, compile-time error checking.

I'm a bit surprised that you are surprised by this. I sometimes think Rust emphasizes memory safety too much - like some people hear it and just think Rust is C but with memory safety. Maybe that's why you're surprised?

Memory safety is a huge deal - not just for security but also because memory errors are the worst kind of bug to debug. If I never have to a memory safety bug that corrupts some data but only in release mode... Those bugs take an enormous amount of time to deal with.

But Rust is really a great modern language that takes all the best ideas from ML and C, and adds memory safety.

(Actually multithreading bugs might be slightly worse but Rust can help there too!)