Anyone here worked with languages like zig, rust, or go? Impressions? Worth your time?
Worth your time?
Is it ever worth anyone's time to jump on a fad language that is essentially just some C-language variant with little else to differentiate it from other C-like languages? How long will these "alternative" languages be around and actively developed and improved? We don't need more languages. We need better skills in existing languages and a focus on improving memory efficiency and performance. No one deep dives a language anymore. We're losing those deep skills and replacing them with frameworks, toolchains and patterns that lead to more mediocrity and bloat. C/C++ need to persist so we can have a stable foundation for computer science to sit upon. Derivative languages are never going to be that foundation.
I don't disagree with your points. However, languages like C++ is only as good as the weakest team member. Thanks to outsourcing, most team members are weak. It's very rare I meet someone who is proficient with C++. Heck, recently I worked with someone who was extremely intelligent but couldn't answer simple questions like, what is the life cycle of this memory and who owns it? He managed to fuck up smart pointers, creating leaks and double frees. Of course, that was somehow my fault.
The answers to these types of questions are forced by languages like Rust. I'm just not sure the language opinions force tedium and headache as the trade. Like it or not, companies like IBM, Oracle, MS, Google, and many others have openly declared war on software engineers and developers. They've spent the last three decades destroying incomes, forcing income downward, and forcing illegals into the country to serve their purposes. This is the market reality. Accordingly languages like Rust, Zig, and Go may have a place at the table. Especially Rust which can do systems level work, inline assembly, and provide safety nets for memory, concurrency and parallelism. But again, at what cost and what's the trade? I dunno.
Heck, Java and C# exist and are extremely popular because of the complexity and no safety net issues associated with languages like C and C++. But both of those languages (Java, C#) carry significant performance and/or memory tradeoffs because of their safety nets; never mind the design by committee insanity. Whereas languages like Rust, Zig, and Go potentially sit between, offering the performance/memory of C/C++ and the safety of C#/Java. I can't entirely dismiss them as simply a fad specifically because I believe it is filling a much needed gap.
Feel free to push back on what I'm missing...
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