[naasking]

> In my experience, GC'd languages leak much more frequently because people figure 'oh, the GC will take care of it for me.'

"Frequent memory leaks" has never happened to me in 20 years of programming in GC'd languages.

> There are excellent tools for detecting memory leaks/safety issues in C

A process you don't even need in GC'd languages. I think I've had maybe a couple of non-critical leaks in those 20 years due to finalizer bugs.

> also, half the costs I listed were related to performance. How the fuck do you justify the statement that those apply to C?

The vast majority of performance issues are related to algorithmic choices. With the right choice of algorithms and data structures, any language will likely get within a constant factor of C.

Sometimes that constant factor matters, most often it does not given the added costs of eliminating that constant factor, eg. in dev time and risk of introducing bugs or security vulnerabilities. And even where it does matter, you're almost certainly better off writing the performance critical kernel in C and then calling into it from a higher level language, as is common in machine learning.