[CSMR]

You can choose which constructs you use. Avoiding classes in F#, while possible, would be a mistake as they are a way to hide data and functions where these are not intended to be part of the public API. F# is outstandingly pragmatic and the struct types for performance have been a nice addition. As a beginner you can ignore those if you are not interested in getting max perf.

Dotnet does have some minor annoyances (exceptions being one) but gives the ability to deploy everywhere, GUI apps on all platforms, web, backend is fantastic. Lack of native GUI apps would be the main deficiency for me from Gleam, plus the fact that they have decided their community is explicitly politically woke-liberal.

Rust has been a fantastic addition to the language ecosystem, but recursive types, which are the bread and butter of ML-family code, are just too hard to write in Rust.