> I'd like to have a different recommendation for a "garbage collected Rust" but there really isn't anything that I think is good enough for the title.
D and Nim are both good candidates IMO.
D and Nim are both good candidates IMO.
Meanwhile, both D and Nim have the benefits of being procedurally grounded, and hence more familiar to someone coming from (say) C# or Java.
Having said that, I think both of those languages may suffer from a lack of tooling/library breadth & depth. Nim in particular seems really cool, but it seems to be struggling to catch enough attention & interest to build a larger community -- probably in large part because it targets many of the same people who are currently high on Rust.
I do agree that D and Nim may be easier to approach from C# or Java, or even Python for Nim or C and C++ for D. These already represent a huge chunk of programmers, but not really what the typical person looking for a "garbage collected Rust" is, in my opinion. Especially since Java and C# programmers already have Scala and F#. While they're both different from what they're used to, they leverage the same plateform and can use the same libraries which is a huge plus.
I agree with your conclusion too, and I think OCaml suffers from this too. Scala and F# have at least the libraries part covered.