Rust has been my primary language for the past 5 years, but it's moving in a direction that gets it farther away from my own values about what software ought to be like. As more features are added to the language, the ways they interact with each other increases the overall complexity of the language and it becomes hard to keep up.

I really like the safety guarantees that Rust provides and I want to keep enjoying them, but the language -- and more importantly, its ecosystem -- is moving from something that was relatively simple to a weird mish-mash of C++, JavaScript, and Haskell, and I'm keeping an eye out for a possible escape hatch.

Zig, Odin, or Hare are not on the same plane of existence as Rust when it comes to out-of-the-box safety (or, at the moment, out-of-the-box suitability for writing production-grade software), but they are simpler and intend to remain that way. That really jives with my values. Yes, this means that some of the complexity of writing software is pushed back onto me, the programmer, but I feel that I have a better shot at writing good software with a simple language than with a complex language where I only superficially understand the features.