Is C++ easier to prototype in? Of course there's the borrow checker, but I feel like Rust at least shows up with some expressiveness niceties that gets you some productivity wins in the prototyping stage.

Though really I suppose "comfort with a language " is such a big factor, seeing people really belt out stuff in C is always a bit impressive to me (yeah yeah, bug filled etc)

C forces me to do the barest minimum and avoid prematurely astronaut architect everything. That often makes it faster to prototype in. Not because I can do more. But because I have to reframe the problem so it fits.

But large codebases in C are tedious to work with and slow to refactor.

> Is C++ easier to prototype in?

Maybe if you’ve already got the toolchain set up and boilerplate templates etc.