I wrote an article (this morning actually!) on picking up Rust to combat AI brain atrophy. My background is JVM-based (Kotlin), and my main contenders were Go vs Rust vs Zig.

My reasoning for settling on Rust:

If I wanted something more general-purpose and ergonomic, I'd stick with something like Kotlin, which has wider ecosystem support. Go could fit here too, but I've heard from more experienced folks that Go's simplicity can get limiting as codebases grow (and requires 100s of developers to be disciplined). Not impossible, just not as conducive.

But since I specifically wanted a performant systems language, I figured I'd go to the other extreme. So my choice was Rust or Zig. I eventually chose Rust (as complicated as Rust can seem) the borrow checker is pretty elegant once it clicks and provides the necessary safety net for a language I intentionally am choosing for more control.

(here's my article on learning Rust if folks are interested: https://kau.sh/blog/learn-rust-ai-atrophy/) - different angle from the linked article.