Why Rust and Go are both dead-end languages ...

C code is very often called from scripting engines. This phenomenon started almost immediately when the first shell scripts appeared, chaining C programs.

It only became more prevalent with scripting popularity (Javascript, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Lua, and so on) going through the roof.

Therefore, any language that aims to replace C will need to be able to carry its APIs over the C ABI. It must be possible for any contender to be called from C code, because that is what it takes to be called from a modern scripting engine too.

The Go language is pretty much incapable of doing this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6125683/call-go-functions-from-c and Rust is also a disaster in this respect: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1732.

Since you cannot call Rust -or Go code from a scripting engine, they are inadvertently positioning themselves as alternatives for the scripting engines themselves.

Go and Rust, however, do not stand a chance when trying to position themselves an alternative to scripting too. This explains why neither Go nor Rust, in their current incarnations, will ever take off as replacements for C.