[jrop]

Just going to jump in here and say that there's another reason I might want Rust with a Garbage Collector: The language/type-system/LSP is really nice to work with. There have indeed been times that I really miss having enums + traits, but DON'T miss the borrow checker.

[tuveson]

Maybe try a different ML-influenced language like OCaml or Scala. The main innovation of Rust is bringing a nice ML-style type system to a more low level language.

[IshKebab]

I wouldn't recommend OCaml unless you plan to never support Windows. It finally does support it in OCaml 5 but it's still based around cygwin which totally sucks balls.

Also the OCaml community is miniscule compared to Rust. And the syntax is pretty bonkers in places, whereas Rust is mostly sane.

Compile time is pretty great though. And the IDE support is also pretty good.

[umanwizard]

There are other nice things about Rust over OCaml that are mainly just due to its popularity. There are libraries for everything, the ecosystem is polished, you can find answers to any question easily, etc. I don't think the same can be said for OCaml, or at least not to the same extent. It's still a fairly niche language compared to Rust.

[Yoric]

Jane Street apparently has a version of OCaml extended with affine types. I'd like to test that, because that would (almost) be the best of all worlds.