My two cents: low-level programming languages (e.g. with manual memory management) are essential for tasks like writing operating systems, video games, real-time audio applications and other such things. There are few low-level programming languages available currently. The most used is C, and while it has its wonderful parts, C can also cause a lot of headaches and bugs. Whether C++ is a good replacement is a can of worms I won't get into.
Hare attempts to improve upon C while still remaining a very simple language, with much better error handling, support for arrays and slices, a rich but still minimal standard library, more concise and powerful function return values using tagged unions, improved memory safety, and other things you can find here:
Disclaimer: I worked on Hare and this is just my personal opinion. I hope everyone can judge whether or not they like Hare for themselves by playing with the language!
Not trying to take away anything, but just from the top of my head: Zig, Rust, Odin, Beef lang and then don’t forget about those that even precede C like Fortran or Pascal.
I think any discussion of small, performant, fairly memory-safe languages could include Forth or Factor. Speaking of the Pascal family, we could also stand for someone to put time into a more modern Oberon or a standard subset of Ada.
As someone who thinks that Forth is an underappreciated language that is very good at some things, it's definitely not "memory-safe". Small and performant, absolutely! (good for bootstrapping a memory-safe language, also yes)
Hare attempts to improve upon C while still remaining a very simple language, with much better error handling, support for arrays and slices, a rich but still minimal standard library, more concise and powerful function return values using tagged unions, improved memory safety, and other things you can find here:
* https://harelang.org/blog/2021-02-09-hare-advances-on-c/
* https://harelang.org/tutorials/introduction/
Disclaimer: I worked on Hare and this is just my personal opinion. I hope everyone can judge whether or not they like Hare for themselves by playing with the language!