Golang is continuing to grow to serve this use case. Just like explicitly handling errors though- you'd be expected to explicitly handle null values if you want to be safe from them
And I appreciate that it has the "errors as values" like I was asking about, though, the types don't really force you to handle them, I don't think?
But it's definitely no Rust. It's a very small language by comparison. That's a positive for me, but you can't have all the Rust things and that at the same time.
I'm not a "1 language for everything" guy. I tend to choose for the task if given the choice or choose for the team so I'm not stuck being the only one that can maintain it. And for anything more than a toy for myself, I always pick something mainstream.
If I'm slapping something together as a 1-off, I tend to go with Python. If I'm writing a CLI, I tend to use Go and I'm using it more for backend stuff. I'll use Java if I have to, because of the team thing. But I won't like it. For toy stuff, I'll pick a language out of a hat just to learn something new. Every few years I'll use a LISP/Scheme.