The main obstacle to making Rust a "C++ but better" language is arguably the half-baked design of its support for pinned data. (Because "pinned", i.e. location-sensitive objects that can't simply be memcpy'd elsewhere are ubiquitous in idiomatic C/C++.) But there are several language proposals to mitigate this in the future, though for most of these a full transition will require an edition change in order not to break backward-compat.
As for the use of 'fat' vs. 'thin' pointers for dynamic dispatch, a C++-style vtable ptr is just a &'static VTableStruct, where VTableStruct is a dictionary of functions. The anyhow crate is a good example of how you can implement that particular approach.
As for the use of 'fat' vs. 'thin' pointers for dynamic dispatch, a C++-style vtable ptr is just a &'static VTableStruct, where VTableStruct is a dictionary of functions. The anyhow crate is a good example of how you can implement that particular approach.