Comment by PaulHoule

I think it is the perception of performance instead of the actual performance, also that C/C++ encroaches on “close to the metal” assembly for many applications. (E.g. when I think how much C moves the stack pointer around meaninglessly in my AVR-8 programs it drives me nuts but AVR-8 has a hard limit and C programs are portable to the much faster ESP32 and ARM.

A while back when my son was playing Chess I wrote a chess engine in Python and then tried to make a better one in Java which could respect time control, it was not hard to make the main search routine work without allocating memory but I tried to do transposition tables with Java objects it made the engine slower, not faster. I could have implemented them with off-heap memory but around that time my son switched from Chess to guitar so I started thinks about audio processing instead.

The Rust vs Java comparison is also pointed. I was excited about Rust the same way I was excited about cyclone when it came out but seeing people struggle with async is painful for me to watch and makes it look like the whole idea doesn’t really work when you get away from what you can do with stack allocation. People think they can’t live with Java’s GC pauses.