Comment by pron

It's not quite as minimal as C, but it definitely could have been made in the 80s or 90s (actually, 70s, too) :) There were far larger, more complex languages back then, including low-level languages such as C++ and Ada, not to mention even bigger high-level languages. High-level languages were already more elaborate even in the 70s (comptime is no more tricky than macro or other meta-programming facilities used in Lisp in the sixties or Smalltalk in the 70s; it certainly doesn't come even remotely close to the sophistication of 1970s Prolog).

I don't think there's any programming language today that couldn't have been implemented in the 90s, unless the language relies on LLMs.