First of all, systems programming language has become an extremely vague term. People use it both for languages that you program kernels in but also in the sense of Ousterhout's dichotomy (i.e. as the opposite of a scripting language).
Second, making garbage collection optional is one of the major defining characteristics of Rust (if not the defining characteristic). If garbage collection is an acceptable alternative for your application domain, and all you want is a statically typed language that compiles to machine code, then you have more language choices than you can throw a stick at.
For example, for me Nim has primarily become a substitute for OCaml; Rust never was an option for this particular role (in part for reasons that had little to do with the language itself [1]).
[1] For example, both Nim's and OCaml's compilers can be distributed with a piece of software and built from source in under a minute, which makes portable source distributions a realistic option.
Nim vs Rust is really bad comparison.
Nim should be compare against GoLang
Rust should be compared against C/C++/
Progress to version 1.0 is pretty much measurable by the number of open high priority bugs. There are lots of other things left to do, but I don't see these taking up as much time as fixing these critical, nasty and time consuming bugs.
Version numbers are not that reasonable to compare; otherwise you should use C# which is at version 5 I think.
C# which is at version 5 I think.
Or Java 8? :D