Also, ironically, go doesn't even do this - it fails compilation on the most useless and pedantic of errors - unused variables and imports. Despite the fact that it's common practice to comment out sections of code during development and debugging, which inevitably leads to unused variables/imports.

This.

So damn annoying and stupid that I finally broke down and modified the compiler to add a -warnunused flag so I don't have to suffer.

https://github.com/kstenerud/go#the-go-programming-language

That's not a bad idea - I may go the same route.

I like go for a lot of reasons. But these idiosyncrasies really drag the language down at times.

How ironic, one of the first things that I missed in Java was that. Nor the compiler error, nor the standard linter (checkstyle) prevents unused variables.

Don't get me wrong, I find Rust has pretty high mental overhead. The borrow checker really is not intuitive to me.

For the niche that Go is applied in often.. .basically middleware type things, long running services, etc. I wouldn't necessarily jump to Rust.

I think Rust is well suited to lower level systems development, as a replacement for C/C++ there.

What's frustrating about Go to me is that we _need_ a nice clean compiled language with a static type system and garbage collection for services development. To replace Java, etc. But ... not this one. Go to me feels like a huge step backwards, and in my experience with code review with the Go folks at Google, it's a very strident and dogmatic language community, too.

I'd like something like OCaml, but with less functional religion, maybe.

C# with .Net Core seems to fit the bill.

I’m keeping an eye on Crystal for this. Version 1 should be coming this year it seems.

It sounds like what you would prefer is a dynamically typed language like Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Clojure, Erlang, etc.