I would say rust. When you learn the basics, rust is very simple and will point to you any errors you have, so you get basically no runtime errors. Also the type system is extremely clean, making the code very readable.
But also C itself is very simple language. I do not mean C++, but pure C. I would probably start with this. Yes, you will crash at runtime errors, but besides that its very very simple language, which will give you good understanding of memory allocation, pointers etc.
Got through C and K&R with no runtime errors, on four platforms, but the first platform... Someone asked the teacher why a struct would not work on Lattice C. The instructor looked at the code, sat down at the students computer, typed in a small program compiled it, and camly put the disks in the box with the manual and threw it in the garbage. "We will have a new compiler next week." We switched to Manx C, which is what we had on the Amiga. Structs worked on MS C, which I thought was the lettuce compiler. ( Apparently a different fork of the portable C compiler, but later they admitted that it was still bigendian years later )
Best programming joke. Teacher said when your code becomes "recalcitrent", we had no idea what he meant. This was in the bottom floor of the library, so on break, we went upstairs and used the dictionary. Recalcitrant means not obeying authority. We laughed out loud, and then went silent. Opps.
The instructor was a commentator on the cryptic-C challenges, and would often say... "That will not do what you think it will do" and then go on and explain why. Wow. We learned a lot about the pre-processor, and more about how to write clean and useful code.
Lattice C (on the Amiga) was my first C compiler! Do you remember what the struct issue you ran into? This was a pretty late version... like 5.x.