Comment by kibwen
2 days ago
> That basically says compiler speed isn’t a goal at all for Rust
No, it says that language design inherently involves difficult trade-offs, and the Rust developers consciously decided that some trade-offs were worth the cost. And their judgement appears to have been correct, because Rust today is more successful than even the most optimistic proponent would have dared to believe in 2014; that users are asking for something implies that you have succeeded to the point of having users at all, which is a good problem to have and one that nearly no language ever enjoys.
In the context of Oberon, let's also keep in mind that Rust is a bootstrapped compiler, and in the early days the Rust developers were by far the most extensive users of the language; nobody on Earth was more acutely affected by compiler performance than they were. They still chose to prefer runtime performance (to be competitive with C++) over compiler performance (to be competitive with Go), and IMO they chose correctly.
And as for the case of Oberon, its obscurity further confirms that prioritizing compiler performance at all cost is not a royal road to popularity.
A few points, Wirth usually always bootstraped his compilers, writing just enough Assembly for the minimal version 0 of the language and go from there.
Secondly, as we all know it isn't grammar and semantics alone that sell compilers, it is someone heavily pushing for adoption, deep pockets companies willing to do everything for adoption, or some successful product on the market that makes learning the language unavoidable when reaching for said product.
Oberon had nothing of that.
C++ had being from UNIX's birthplace, quick adoption by C compiler vendors and UNIX clones, exactly because of that. While being pushed by IBM, Microsoft and Apple on their GUI OS frameworks.
Rust as great language as it is, if it had been some university language done as someone thesis, not tied to Mozzilla, and their efforts to fix Firefox security issues with their C++ codebase, most likely would not taken off.