If nim picks up pace in a few years and I already have a sense of it, it may be a good for prospects too.
One advantage over C++ is that you don't need to learn make, IDEs or a complex build system. The nim compiler and the nimble package manager just takes care of building for you. "nim c main.nim" and off you go, ending up with a single executable, no matter how many imports, modules, etc you have.
I do recommend this as a gentle introduction: https://nim-by-example.github.io/ and recommend you use VS Code with the Nim extension by saem.
The documentation is good enough that I don't need to google most of the stuff while writing Nim, having types definitely help with that.
You can learn that with Nim too. It supports manual memory management like C. The new ARC/ORC GC also works more like modern C++ than a traditional GC.
> its wasm support would integrate with your JS knowledge
Nim can also compile to JS. Or you could compile it first to C and then compile that to wasm, although that's not supported out of the box.
It does have an easier on-ramp story for getting started/adding dependencies and that may be important for getting started.
It is, but if you want to write C or C++ that doesn't crash, or just silently work incorrectly then you have to internalise these rules anyway. And having a compiler that gives you a helpful error message when you get it wrong is much easier than getting a segfault at runtime that may not even occur in a proximate part of the code. Let me put it this way: in 5 years of using Rust I am yet to need a debugger, and only need even println debugging rarely.
I don’t disagree with you on the safety aspects* and 100% real production code should really be starting in Rust. From a learning perspective though… not as sold yet. There’s a lot of things nicer (the stdlib is 100x better and more ergonomic and more pythonic in terms of “batteries included”). There’s a different set of edges though and none of the ownership concepts you learn really transfer anywhere else so you’re learning Rust’isms but not general systems programming things (just like goroutines teach you Go’isms and not what high performance thread safety means).
* The debugger claim feels specious because segfaults aren’t the only source of bugs that need debugging. How do you deal with an unexpected panic or logic bugs?
Rust is easier than C/C++, but not at first. After you learn the semantics of it, is very smooth sailing (at least until you get into the most exotic needs like build your own async runtime).