Exactly. For me, Haskell was a gateway to Nim. I wanted something that feels familiar, but with a strong type system and native speed.

I wish I could invest some time in working with Nim. It doesn't get as much attention as it deserves in my opinion, and it would really benefit from growing the community a bit.

Have you looked at Swift? It's pretty similar to Rust, but eschews all the lifetime stuff in favour of a runtime that does reference counting.

Swift is useful if you're an Apple developer only targeting Apple users, seems like a bit of a niche.

Swift works reasonably well on Linux. You can even run Swift on Windows 10 through Windows Subsystem for Linux.

I tried under Arch a few months ago and found swathes of the standard library didn't appear to work, is this something which has been fixed?

AFAIK only the core language is fully ported, for the libraries ... it is a work in progress.

In other words it is useless currently.

Tell that to IBM that uses Swift in production. See IBM's Kitura open source server framework if you are interested.

They use a language without a standard library in production?

I'm sure you can find yourself the answer if you are really interested, here is an example: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3122994/apple-mac/ibm-s...

Or this one https://developer.ibm.com/swift/

Actually Swift 4.0 just got some memory ownership support, with more to come later.

Link? Last I checked all of Swift's ownership ideas were just in-progress proposals, with implementation to be left to far-future releases.

Watch the video about the talk, what is new in Swift 4.0 at WWDC 2017.

Basically 4.0 will introduce the notion of exclusive access, with more affine type ideas to follow up on 4.x.

EDIT: This feature is described by SE-0176.

https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposa...