Yeah, I find that a lack of a GC means that I don't reach for these languages unless I have a reason to think I really need that level of performance, you lose too many conveniences, the perf gains are usually not worth the investment of thinking through memory ownership. The only language of this class that I regularly use is D, in that lang I can remove all the GC parts for things that do have such perf reqs while reusing most of my GC code, but the things I can do with GC end up being really concise and easy to read, while still being faster than the equivalent python :shrug:.

To be fair to Jai, Odin and Zig, there are definitely software libraries/applications that the world would benefit from having, where this level of performance is basically required. The standard tends to be C++ these days (Rust is rapidly gaining ground, but it's still inconvenient in cases where you frequently need to abstract under the allocator), and I think everyone is looking for a way to not have to write c++ for this stuff.

Interesting. I feel similarly but use Rust since I don't really have to think about GC or non GC, I use it more as a modern StandardML or OCaml but with much better performance.