I love Rust, but I miss C. If C can be updated to make it generally socially acceptable for new projects, I'd happily go back for some decent subset of things I do. However, there's a lot of anxiety and even angst around using C in production code.
If you can stomach the occasional Begin and End, and a far less confusing pointer syntax, Pascal might be the language for you. Free Pascal has some great string handling, so you never have to worry about allocating and freeing them, and they can store gigabytes of text, even Unicode. ;-)