> I think enabling a language to be garbage collected in general, while making a borrow checker opt in for special, time critical functions is the best of both worlds.

Put everything you don't want to manage into Rcs, RefCells, Boxes and the like, and you'll more or less feel like you're using a (verbose) GCed language (with a loss of performance and safety as a natural consequence).

> I enjoy Rust and have been writing it for quite some time. However, I feel like server side languages still have a long way to go. Client-side languages in comparison have been only growing better

The fact you call them "server-side language" is a strong bias. Not everything is a client/server app.