I ended up appreciating the guardrails it provides around safety that Nim doesn't...

fwiw this is plain wrong, a garbage collected language in general is memory safe, just with a different scheme (a garbage collector) than rust's memory model. Both are better options from one that is unmanaged.

I hate to attract negative attention from rust fanboys. But none likes Rust's borrow checker and hopefully language developers can come up with a better design.