I wouldn't choose Rust because of compile times. C++'s aren't great either, but with discipline in how you structure headers, you can get them down to a pretty reasonable place. Unsafe Rust is also a bit of a PITA, and I have cases where I care lot about precisely how memory is laid out and accessed, I'd have to resort to it quite a lot. I don't love crates either, they smell a bit like node_modules and all big Rust projects I've seen have hundreds of them. Most C++ libraries are self contained, by nature of not having an easy way to declare dependencies.

I wouldn't choose Go because GC is a non-starter.

I wouldn't choose C because it's nice to have some form of generics or metaprogramming, even if templates are not exactly fantastic.

I wouldn't choose Zig because the language isn't stable, and the lead developer has hinted that they'll drop LLVM down the line, and I don't want to beta test their compiler backend.

Because, used sensibly, C++ is a better C. This is more or less what C++98 was, and even that is probably too much.

Compiler stuff in MLIR.