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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember about 5 years ago, StackOverflow for OCaml was a nightmare. It was a mishmash of Core (from Jane Street) Batteries, and raw OCaml. New developers were confronted with the prospect of opening multiple libraries with the same functionality. (not the correct way of solving any problem)
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.
I think you're referring to OxCaml. I'd love to see this make a huge splash. Right now one of the biggest shortcomings of OCaml, is one is still stuck implementing so much stuff from scratch. Languages like Rust, Go and Java have HUGE ecosystems. OCaml is just as old (even older than Rust since OCaml inspired Rust and its original compiler was written in OCaml) as these languages. Since it's not been as popular, it's hard to find well-supported libraries.
I too wish that some OxCaml features bring new blood to OCaml. I've been using OCaml for a few years for personal projects and I find the language really simple and powerful at the same time, but I had to implement me some foundational libraries (e.g. proper JSON, parser combinators), and now I'm considering porting one of those projects to Rust just so I can have unboxed types and better Windows support.
> even older than Rust
That's an understatement, (O)Caml is between 17 and 25 years older than Rust 0.1 depending on which Caml implementation you start counting from.
