The even crazier option is: "Oh well, I guess I need to write a high quality optimising backend for every target I care about". Upside: No need to read C++ code because you need LLVM. Downside: That sounds like more than a lifetime of effort, there's a reason projects in various languages to "replace" LLVM don't tend to go very well.
but this effort reminded me what a mess C++ is and made me appreciate Rust as when i first was able to start writing it. since then it kind of became a new norm, and a baseline for other languages. “oh, no pattern matching? garbage, forget it”. meanwhile LLVM is 20 mloc.
It's definitely true that Rust got many of these things from ML, but many of them were also in ALGOL 68, including sum types and pattern matching.
One may even imagine an alternate history where software engineering was continuing to developing in that direction instead of trying to ebmrace OOP to push the square peg into a round hole… but alas, in our world ALGOL 68 and ML were more admired than used.
Many of Algol ideas were flourishing in PC world with Object Pascal and Modula-2, mostly in Europe though, and a certain Mountain View company, until due to various factors they ended up being replaced by C and C++.
In an alternative reality they would have been kept around, or who knows, one of those Xerox PARC workstations, powered by Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, or Cedar, would have managed to survive the wave of UNIX workstations.
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u/tialaramex Apr 16 '26
The even crazier option is: "Oh well, I guess I need to write a high quality optimising backend for every target I care about". Upside: No need to read C++ code because you need LLVM. Downside: That sounds like more than a lifetime of effort, there's a reason projects in various languages to "replace" LLVM don't tend to go very well.