Of course they won't be able to grasp everything that Rust has to offer, but that is true of any language. I think Rust will expose them to many theoretical and practical CS concepts that they will be glad to have at least heard of during their studies.

In our degree, the first year students learn to program with Python, Racket (or OCaml depending on which teacher they get), C, Prolog, Bash, … Each of these language have way more to offer than what they can grasp. But each of them offers a different approach to programming and help the students to actually learn to program (rather than learning to write Java code, for example).

The course in question is actually called "Advanced programming". I want to experiment with a Rust course in second year as a kind of followup to both the functional programming course (the Racket/OCaml one) and the imperative programming course (the C one) that they have during the first year. If it really doesn't work, we'll change for something else or simply swap back to it being "Advanced C programming" for instance. But first, let's try to make the Rust experiment work. I really think it can benefits our students!