> I'd recommend using a language with garbage collection unless you really need to not though; OCaml is quite Rust-like but means you won't have to worry about the borrow checker

OTOH, Rust arguably has a better story for tooling (build system, dependency management, etc.), a more full-featured standard library, and better concurrency support. Depending on your priorities, some or all of these might be worth having to learn the borrow checker.