I don't necessarily disagree with not having a string type in a low level language, but you seem very fixated on needing a character type. Why not just have string be an opaque type, and have functions to iterate over code points, grapheme clusters, etc.?

I don't think Zig is memory safe?

Zig is not memory safe. It's one of those "can be more safe than C" modern alternative languages. This includes those various C/C++ alternatives that use a GC or optional one (that users can disable), to provide or increase memory safety. Some of the confusion and drama surrounding Zig, appears to be the vain attempt of marketing it as "safer" than "unsafe Rust". The questionable marketing tactic has sparked numerous arguments and debates.

I was replying to this bit

> difference between C++ and C is that the former is a large multi-paradigm language, while the latter is a minimalist language. These are completely different axes. > There is no corresponding popular replacement for C that's more minimalist than Rust and memory safe.

Edit: oh, I never read the last bit "and memory safe" -- well ya, that's kind of rust's major advantage.

> Also commonly known as reinventing the wheel, the curse of any IT project.

Continuing with the vehicle metaphors, the wheel has been reinvented many times for different purposes. The wheel on a tractor is different from that of a Formula One car.

What do the version numbers of programs communicate to end users anyway? Basically just that it's newer than the last version.

Libraries are a bit different though, because of semver compatibility, but unfortunately they are wrong often enough that you can't really rely on them anyway.

I think it's more acknowledging the gain in development efficiency you can get by working on something with lower fidelity.

OCaml doesn't monomorphize functions. Instead references to every type are the same size (either a tagged int or a pointer). This is a sweet spot for OCaml, but doesn't really work for a language that doesn't allocate everything on the heap.

Indeed. Ocaml is GC'd, and that makes the implementation different. However, the question was about compile times, and i dare to say Ocaml is one if the fastest ones out there, even tho it has an rich and expressive typesystem. The conclusion then needs to be that the type system expressiveness (complexity?) does not alone make for slow compile times.

The Dreamcast port requires a purchased copy of the game for the assets, so if anything I'd expect it to drive more sales.

I think they called it Steam Deck to avoid confusion with their previous Steam Machines.

> This cannot be modeled effectively in a static system. You can use a sum type, but that's just a greenspunned ad hoc dynamic type.

This can easily be modeled in a static type system. All you really need is subtyping.

> we’re back at square one of the information being possibly wrong.

Isn't this the case with everything an LLM produces?

Exactly, that’s my point.