I don't see why a VM is a problem, personally, and I like a lot of what C# has been exploring with `Span<T>` and `Memory<T>` for safe low-level memory management in a garbage-collected language. Some of it seems like a simpler Rust. Rust can still do plenty of memory lifetime things that C# can't, but the gap is smaller than ever and C# is still slowly growing its capabilities in that space. All that in a language where you don't have to start with the low level tools, you can prototype entirely in higher-level garbage collected space and use real world performance to guide optimizations towards the low-level memory management tools only when they become truly necessary.