I’ll second Rust, it’s so fresh and versatile! You can go from super low level stuff all the way to things like web frameworks with WebAssembly and whatnot.

The memory model is definitely a unique beast but I’ve found it gave me some insight on how it all actually works behind the scenes and I appreciate the strictly enforced correctness too.

I’m a Rust noob. At first it’s daunting and nothing will compile. But it’s getting easier and I feel like getting over that initial difficulty is mainly a matter of internalizing a few basic rules, after which it feels more natural. So from what I’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t rate Rust as especially difficult. It certainly feels easier than C++.

For a really challenging language I’d suggest Haskell. That one nearly broke my brain because thinking functionally is really very different if you’re used to more procedural languages. Rust, it seems, teaches you new discipline, but Haskell teaches you a different way of thinking.

Anyway, that’s how it feels as a relative noob in both.

Definitely rust, and definitely use rustrover from jetbrains for an IDE. It’s amazing

Well, yeah, because doing things with hardware is just always unsafe in that sense, no matter if you’re implementing it in Rust or C or Assembly. As long as you know what you’re doing (and the hardware manufacturer did, too), it’s not actually unsafe.

Rust just decided to isolate the code parts where you need to be extra smart like that, whereas in C or Assembly, you might need to be extra smart throughout the entire code base.
Obviously, no sane C programmer would just randomly start scrubbing memory addresses in UI code, but it’s still just helpful to have the naughty code clearly indicated.

Hardware is inherently unsafe.