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Why not step off the beaten path and try a language that is safer than Rust, has a better concurrency story than Go, performance similar to C (but without as many ways to shoot yourself in the foot)? Ada.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I have no projects or specific uses for these languages. Rather, I am treating it as a tool for learning and to experience low level programming. I might make some kind of machine learning application in it later down the line though.
The usual recommendation "for learning and to experience low level programming" would be C. See this for example http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html although that was written before Go and Rust. Also if you're mucking about with machine learning a lot of the libraries seem to be in C or C++. I played about a bit with computer vision using Python but sometimes the Python bindings don't work or do…
If you don't need a language that's as low-level as possible, then Go is also a good language to learn. It doesn't have much to teach in the way of memory management, but it does have pointers.
C and Go are quite small languages. I love C for its history and low-level view of the machine. It's worthwhile learning C I think, as a way to understand part of the history of programming. However it makes it time consuming to program even simple things. Go is more productive, with maps, strings and a garbage collector. C++ and Rust are both relatively complex. If you have aspirations to working on large native pro…
I'd probably throw my vote at C for a low level language. Even if you never actually write anything in C, being able to understand the massive amount of code out there in C is a definite plus, and it gives you a good understanding of what's happening at the machine level and underneath the abstraction of other languages.
Why not step off the beaten path and try a language that is safer than Rust, has a better concurrency story than Go, performance similar to C (but without as many ways to shoot yourself in the foot)? Ada.
Ada doesn't have Rust's concurrency-safety guarantees, and if you're using dynamic allocation then Ada requires a garbage collector to maintain memory safety whereas Rust doesn't.
From my experience with learning Rust, it might be a little hard to grasp both "the low level world" and Rust-specific things at once.
I would really recommend learning to program in assembler. And I think the best way to do that is something like AVR [1] or ARM on an embedded device but X86 is do-able with NASM [2] [3]
There's always MIPS via SPIM [4]
Learning assembler will give you more than simply swapping one imperative language for another. Python / Java -> C / Go / Rust is really not that large a leap. You will have the basics down in a few evenings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmel_AVR