[vezzy-fnord]

It's not just clunky FFIs. There are simply some APIs and standards (like POSIX) that are more-or-less designed with a specific language in mind, in the aforementioned case that being C. Using them from a different language can simply feel awkward, though I suppose there has been a shortage of effort in bridging the gap.

I agree that the ridiculous dependency chains and brittle build tooling/bootstrapping are getting out of hand in modern development. Go actually gets this thing right, but is bare bones in every other regard (which I also appreciate, I enjoy Rob Pike's work).

I can't really think of any solution to this dilemma, though. Fundamentally, it's not just limitations of languages, but of operating systems, as well. Having a file server-centric OS design instead of a daemon-centric one for providing services alone will simplify a whole lot of things that we're used to abstracting in libraries.