To me Rust is more like "C++ done right". It's massively bigger, more complicated and slower to compile than C. The C ABI is also the de-facto lingua franca for language interop, something that's not easily achievable with Rust or C++ (or Go, for that matter).

Have you tried Rust?

The ABI in Rust is doable: https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/rust-stable-abi.html

And it doesn't feel like C++ when writing it. The syntax and language features are nice and feel modern.

It does require more attention because of what it compiles down to, but the compiler is there to help with it.

I haven't been excited about any programming languages in years, but Rust has certainly taken my attention lately.

I love Rust so dearly that I wish I could marry it, but I still feel that it's a massively more complicated language than C.