[grumdan]

I have found Rust to be a nice middle-ground for this. Sure, the borrow checker takes some getting used to, but it features an ML-style type system (though I still miss some extensions to Haskell's type system available in GHC), rock-solid tooling, and a comprehensive well-documented standard library. The high quality of third-party crates also surprised me. Whether the C-like syntax is sane is debatable though.

[weberc2]

Yeah, Rust is the best ML for the things I care about, but after 5 years of on-and-off use, I still haven't adapted to the borrow-checker and a GC is just fine for the applications I write. And learning curve is important too--I need to be able to onboard new developers quickly. Go simply offers the better tradeoffs today for my apps. If someone built a "Rust-lite"--Rust with Go's runtime or Go with Rust's type system (less its lifetimes and borrowing semantics--insofar as those are considered a part of its type system), that would be my primary app dev language. But it's looking like Go is going to get there first with its proposal for generics and hope for sum types.