[sunshowers]

> I am unfamiliar but I think Go meets most of your requirements.

Go definitely meets many of the requirements here such as fast startup time, but it (like every other imperative language that's not Rust) fails at the & and &mut separation which I've come to regard as the most fundamental requirement of all. Go also doesn't have enums with data and exhaustive pattern matching, and its Windows support is also a bit dodgy -- see things like https://pkg.go.dev/os#Chmod where they try to emulate Unix chmod on Windows. When writing Windows-specific code I want to use Windows idioms, not a Unix emulation layer.

> Does the embedded world need or want async/await?

There is definitely a case to be made that async should have just made futures active and foregone embedded. But people on embedded do use async, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1nx4df1/comment/nhllr... and https://lib.rs/crates/lilos by my coworker Cliff Biffle (which I understand is now being used at a big tech company).