These type comments always remind me that we forget where we come from in terms of computation, every time.

It's important to remember Rust's borrow checker was computationally infeasible 15 years ago. C & C++ are much older than that, and they come from an era where variable name length affected compilation time.

It's easy to publicly shame people who do hard things for a long time in the light of newer tools. However, many people who likes these languages are using them longer than the languages we champion today were mere ideas.

I personally like Go in these days for its stupid simplicity, but when I'm going to do something serious, I'll always use C++. You can fight me, but never pry C++ from my cold, dead hands.

For note, I don't like C & C++ because they are hard. I like them because they provide a more transparent window the processor, which is a glorified, hardware implemented PDP-11 emulator.

Last, we shall not forget that all processors are C VMs, anyway.

> It's important to remember Rust's borrow checker was computationally infeasible 15 years ago.

The core of the borrow checker was being formulated in 2012[1], which is 13 years ago. No infeasibility then. And it's based on ideas that are much older, going back to the 90s.

Plus, you are vastly overestimating the expense of borrow checking, it is very fast, and not the reason for Rust's compile times being slow. You absolutely could have done borrow checking much earlier, even with less computing power available.

1: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/11/18/ima...

> It's important to remember Rust's borrow checker was computationally infeasible 15 years ago.

IIRC borrow checking usually doesn't consume that much compilation time for most crates - maybe a few percent or thereabouts. Monomorphization can be significantly more expensive and that's been much more widely used for much longer.

> It's important to remember Rust's borrow checker was computationally infeasible 15 years ago. C & C++ are much older than that, and they come from an era where variable name length affected compilation time.

I think you're setting the bar a little too high. Rust's borrow-checking semantics draw on much earlier research (for example, Cyclone had a form of region-checking in 2006); and Turbo Pascal was churning through 127-character identifiers on 8088s in 1983, one year before C++ stream I/O was designed.

EDIT: changed Cyclone's "2002" to "2006".

I remember, I was there in the 1980's coding, hence why I know C and C++ were not the only alternatives, rather the ones that eventually won in the end.

> the processor, which is a glorified, hardware implemented PDP-11 emulator.

This specific seems like just gratuitously rewriting history.

I can get how you'd feel C (and certain dialects of C++) are "closer to the metal" in a certain sense: C supports very few abstractions and with fewer abstractions, there are less "things" between you and "the metal". But this is as far as it goes. C does not represent - by any stretch of imagination - an accurate computational model or a memory of a modern CPU. It does stay close to PDP-11, but calling modern CPUs "glorified hardware emulators of PDP-11" is just preposterous.

PDP-11 was an in-order CISC processor with no virtual memory, cache hierarchy, branch prediction, symmetric multiprocessing and SIMD instruction. Some modern CPUs (namely the x86/x64 family of CPUs) do emulate a CISC ISA on that is probably more RISC-like, but that's as far we can say they are trying to behave like a PDP-11 (even though the intention was to behave like a first-gen Intel Pentium).

> we shall not forget that all processors are C VMs

This idea is some 10yrs behind. And no, thinking that C is "closer to the processor" today is incorrect

It makes you think it is close which in some sense is even worse