Rust is close to C++, in that you get a lot of high level constructs to help you. C is very low level, and you can learn the syntax in a weekend, but you'll also have to learn memory management and implement advanced structures (linked lists, etc) yourself.

Memory management isn't too hard, it's mostly remembering who created what, who reads and writes to it, and who is responsible for cleaning up. With some additional comments as you go it's not too hard. Also, depending on what your doing, leaks may be acceptable. A short lived program can leak all it likes, and the OS will clean up for you ibthe end :D

Python is like your automatic transmission. It handles a lot of work on the backend to make life easier, but the trade off is performance and control.

In C/C++, you’re reaching into the gearbox and moving it by hand. It doesn’t clean up anything for you and doesn’t prevent you from making dumb mistakes. In exchange, it can be wildly faster than Python.

In Assembly/Binary, you’re crafting the gears before you can even start the car.

So C is basically assembly with a bunch of syntactic sugar on top. It manages a lot of the book keeping and boilerplate, but at the end of the day there's not a ton of difference between them in terms of the abstractions it provides. If you know assembly learning C is a piece of cake. If you don't you're probably going to take a while to really wrap your head around pointers and the myriad ways C can use them for great and terrible things. Beyond pointers (and race conditions if you're crazy enough to do multithreading in C) the rest of C is super easy because there really isn't much else there.

Rust on the other hand is a much higher level language more comparable to something like Java, C++, or Python. It gives you a lot of tools to solve complicated problems but unlike Java and Python and like C++ it still gives you the option of working at a low level when you need to. The big advantage it has over C++ is that it learned from the many mistakes C++ made over the years, and the borrow checker really is a unique and powerful solution to both memory management but also crucially concurrency problems.

Somewhat. The issue isn't memory leaks themselves so much as learning project architecture, patterns, and generally how to do things without shooting yourself in the foot.

Rust has plenty of gotchas and unintuitive elements, so they're not too different in that sense. Though Rust is more likely to point out when you've done something wrong, where as C will exercise your debugging skills.

Modern C++ is also an option, and surprisingly easy to use. The only catch is that the errors can be very difficult to parse and it's hard to find modern best-practice materials to learn from since most of industry is quite far behind compared to where the language is.

One benefit Rust has is that it's quite new and niche, so the materials tend to be of fresh, without much legacy mindset, and of a relatively high quality. Tbh I'm not sure how Rust is for newbies, but it may be worth a shot. At the very least, the community is passionate and the errors will be readable...