Why impose the "embedded systems" space requirement on the OP? The OP does not work in embedded systems space. So it is not relevant to this article. The OP is telling us what they would do, not what you should do and definitely not what embedded systems startups should do.

That's fair, I was definitely being a bit too general. There's another comment in this thread that summarizes it better which is asking "what would I use if Rust didn't exist?" and I think that's a more clear line. All of my embedded work was in C/asm so Rust is actually a great choice there.

To me, the language agnostic answer to reducing tech debt is having a good test suite so refactoring is easier. We're pretty good on that front.

We have definitely done large refactors before, and I'm sure we'll have more in the future, but I don't think we need a major rewrite or anything like that.

As long as you know what you are doing Ruby won't leave you with more technical debt than Go or Rust.

How many people know how to effectively program in languages like Ruby is another question altogether...