Rust is getting to be popular for graphics and games, precisely because it has the performance of, and easy interoperability with, C, without GC, and in a much more modern environment.
Low memory requirements means portability to memory-constrained platforms. Interoperability with C presumably also implies easier access to low-level resources such as GPUs, and being able to take advantage of existing libraries for C, such as SDL.
People are also experimenting with Go in the same space, but it seems much less promising. Go is notoriously slow at calling C (or being called from C) due to goroutine context save/restore. It also has GC and a runtime.