The way you describe your use case I think you are fine with a language with garbage collection like Nim (which has has a syntax a bit like Python) or Crystal. I would also throw Go in the ring or if you are interested to learn a bit of functional programming then you also could look at Ocaml.

Zig has no garbage collection btw, but makes it easier than C to handle that. Another language without garbage collection that helps a lot to avoid memory issues is Ada (Looks a bit like Pascal). So there are alternatives to Rust.