While you can't generally get away from the GC in Scala, you can escape the JVM if you want either by using Scala Native or by making native images with Graal. Like you, I find Rust to be very exciting. I still do numerical simulation work with C++ and I would love to convert that to Rust, but I also love to see the progress that Scala Native has made recently as I think that could open new doors for Scala if they can get it to the level of support currently seen in Scala.js.