I'm a fairly seasoned C programmer. I actually started with C++ back in the last century, but when I had the chance to do plain C I quickly saw it's benefits over C++ (at least back then). I have long pined for a better language that could be used for embedded systems programming.

In my current job I am now using C++14/17 (not my choice). I'm starting to like auto, but not much else. The "smart" pointers and "move" are hard for me to reason about still. I'd have an easier time reasoning about raw pointers and references, mainly because that's all I had in my early C++ days and C days (of course). I think things like asan and ubsan are far more helpful even with plain C than features like smart pointers.

I've tried Rust. The author of TFA linked to another article explaining that rust tricks you because it looks like languages you have used before, but it's really not like them. That made me feel better about my experience. I found it to be very frustrating. I'll have to try it again with a different mindset.

I haven't tried go, but I don't feel like it's a viable embedded programming language because of it's garbage collector. At least not for tightly contrained embedded systems. I'm honestly not sure rust is going to work for those types of systems either. Sometimes you just have to poke bits into memory and I'm not sure how a super safe language will deal with that better than C.