trl-lib/stack-llama · Is Rust for giga chads only?

There are a few other languages that make this claim.

Julia is known as the language of machine learning, which has been going around since it was released in early 2016.
OCaml has some tooling to do ML work and was used by Google’s Brain team before they moved over to TensorFlow.
Rust was originally targeted at producing high performance code with systems programming features, but now there are plenty of frameworks like Cargo or Serde to help you manage your project.
Hopefully these links will give you an idea what each language can offer you.