[cpach]

Seems like Go might be able to fit your bill. AFAICT the designers of Go has gone out of their way to avoid adding cruft to the language.

Yes it has GC. What is it that you want to build though? Will GC be in the way? If so, I would consider Rust instead.

C is simple, true – but in many cases it seems like that fact pushes the complexity up to higher layers instead.

C still has it’s place in embedded. And our best kernels are currently written in C. Outside of those domains I don’t see much reasons to start a greenfield project in C.

[linkdd]

OP:

  > C++, Java, Rust are far from minimal. Go feels minimal but it too has a lot of features compared to C and it has a garbage collector too.

You:

  > Seems like Go might be able to fit your bill.
  > I would consider Rust instead.

That's exactly what OP did not want...

[cpach]

True! But if OP wants a dialogue about language choices then IMHO it could be good to motivate the reasons. E.g. they didn’t explain why they didn’t want GC.

As others have pointed out in this thread, there are good reasons why Rust is designed the way it is.

With that said, I hope the OP will find a language that they like and can be productive in. Hopefully they input from this thread can be of guidance.