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In many larger projects, there is a need for efficiency and/or low-level work in _some_ corners, _and_ there is also a need for productivity, rapid development in _other_ parts. And everywhere do we want maintainable and readable code that is easy to understand. Selecting more than one language sometimes works, in my experience you can have various microservices that talk to each other, then it doesn't matter what language each is implemented in. However, it isn't optimal to have to master more than one language (most good people do, but we also want to cater to weaker team members; in football, not everyone is a Ronaldo, Pele or Messi either). I don't see why C++ or Rust shouldn't have opt-in garbage collection offered for parts of the codebase where this makes sense (where productivity is worth more than runtime speed), which is probably most part of most projects if we are honest. As some of you know Rust actually _had_ GC in an earlier version, and some readers may complain saying "but C++ can do GC if you want" (of course you can add a Boehm-style GC in your project). But what I'm referring to is that there should be a "batteries included" GC-enabled part of systems programming languages by default (as a technical and cultural preferred setting), unless you mark up a library/crate/class as performance-relevant. This could be done with a mechanism similar to marking up "unsafe", e.g. "uncritical" (= runtime matters less in this section compared to productivity). Then strings and other objects could be garbage-collected and programmers could focus on solving the actual problem instead of managing memory. Critical sections could be marked as such, and there'd be the much-coveted "zero overhead" abstractions for these.
The advantage is you would not need to stay up to date in two languages, and you could avoid FFI-type integration, which tends to be brittle (JNI? shudder!). An entirely separate point is the availability of programmers that master a language. I totally agree with the poster that you should use a mainstream language to avoid being hit by a talent shortage. |