Flutterby™! : I have a couple of personal projects

I have a couple of personal projects I'd like to hack together, but I'm kinda stuck because I want to move my own skills forward as I do it. Python is a fucking dependency and performance nightmare, ECMAScript involves package managers, Rust is "what if we made the code endlessly complex because you need to manually manage arenas", and I'm quickly back to choosing between C++ and Perl, and that's just solving my problem, not actually learning anything.