There's a smaller, simpler, safer language lying in Rust called "Rust without async", which would be good enough for the 99% of use-cases that don't need absolute-lowest-possible-latency async.

Author here.

Yao is already fully designed. And while I haven't updated its example file [1] to include everything, it would only be a max of two or three times bigger.

This includes generics, an equivalent to Zig comptime, something like traits but more powerful, a solution to the expression problem, etc.

The solution is structured concurrency.

The only reason I am not working more on Yao is because I worked on it for three years at full tilt (because I constantly refactor to eliminate tech debt), and I am burned out.

But adding a new feature takes only about two hours max; I just add a new client-defined keyword.

[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/src/yao/exa...

This, I don't understand why we have to load these languages up with so much syntax, it's mind boggling to think that some how we feel it's beneficial to have so much. I'm admittedly biased to the symbolic expression but surely we could have come up with some middle ground.

Not sure about smaller or simpler, but Ada is definitely more readable in my opinion.