Having used Rust for this, what are your thoughts about how Rust fares for such tasks -- is coding this in Rust better than using C; do you think you are having fewer problems in the end-product as compared to if you had used C. What are the kinds of issues that annoy you about Rust for this? Does the promise of Rust hold up? I am trying to see if I should use Rust for network programming and want to find out how Rust feels for these kinds of projects.

Honestly, comparing (safe) Rust to C is like comparing Java to C. Rust is a higher level language than C, so writing in Rust means (especially for security and network programming) means that I don't have to worry about initialization of memory, or allocation, or deallocation. That's where all my bugs came from in C.

In terms of use, I'd say there are still gaps in the number of available libraries, and features of those. I had to add some options to the OpenSSL Rust interface for instance. The non-blocking IO library, mio, is very solid and portable! And I want to play with rotor as a higher level abstraction.

If you use Rust instead of C, you will have fewer memory related bugs, and you have more portable code than std C. Rust makes happy low level programmers :)