I tried Rust and found it to be fun (I generally think how I would solve a problem in C and then try to make my rust program follow the same exact logic without any additional overhead, trying to not use unsafe rust as much as possible, which I find to be fun).

Unfortunately, I noticed that compile times are noticeable on even very simple programs (on the scale of seconds) on my machine, which I find problematic, because that means that complex programs written in rust will probably take an eternity to compile. (I haven't actually tried compiling any such software yet, though) I wonder what parts of the compilation process are the biggest factor in compile times, and if one could theoretically do away with it and still have a memory safe language.

What I'm about to say may be very influenced by my love for Scheme, but I feel like Rust is a very complex language, and I find unlikely that any alternative implementation will ever be made because of that (or it will be done but at the cost of massive amount of effort from various people). I think diversity of implementations, extensibility and simplicity are important in a language.

Am I misguided, or acting too much on my first impressions? And what other memory safe systems programming languages (so languages that don't rely on a garbage collector) are out there besides Rust?