Before pcwalton or some other rust shill derails comments, I just want to say that rust is the last language you should be considering if you're interested in systems programming.

You should learn C. This is not up for debate, and you should learn it even if you don't plan to write it.

Then I would recommend Go. If you're gonna be writing C++ then you don't need me to tell you about the ten million resources out there, but you might look at Go once you start hitting those roadblocks and think about how certain problems were solved, why Go solves them, and why creating new problems in rust isn't a helpful way to actually get work done.

In not a huge Google fanboy, I hate most of their products and services, but I can appreciate the logistical undertaking it must be to operate all of that and part of what's so cool about Go, especially coming from a C++ background is seeing how problems that would be hard to solve at Google-scale are so easily solved with Go.