IMHO, if you stick to just unsafe rust, it’s got similar ergonomics to Zig. And the lack of safety in Zig to me is a move in the wrong direction for a language

IMHO, if you stick to just unsafe rust, it’s got similar ergonomics to Zig. And the lack of safety in Zig to me is a move in the wrong direction for a language created so recently. The safety is the added complexity because so much of what we regularly do can fail in ways we don’t think about. The alternative so far has been to introduce some kind of automated memory management like reference counting or a GC. Rust in fact gets much simpler (but slightly verbose) if you wrap everything in an Arc. That’s why I say in another comment that Swift is the closest to a more accessible Rust. Granted, until Swift 6, it won’t go as far as Rust for thread safety. But for everything else, it is Rust without having to think about as much while writing.