If I'm using C, it's probably because I'm doing something low level and garbage collector could be problematic there. If you are fine with complexity, C++ or Rust are better options. If you want a simple language, I'd suggest Zig.

On the other hand, if I don't want to deal with memory management, and still want fairly fast compiled language, I'd just go with Go. It has a much better ecosystem, because low level GC language is really mostly targeted at server components and Go excels there with implicit async everywhere.