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With 21st century developer workstations having >= 8 cores, >= 2Ghz, >= 16Gb memory, it is ridiculous to have the scaffolding that Rust, Zig and other modern languages have. Source files dont live on their own and shouldn't be compiled as isolated units, they live in projects and need to be compiled as a batch. I'm stunned to see that so many developers are used to needing scaffolding, they just accept it as being necessary, but when you step back and think about it, it no longer makes any sense to require it. C and C++ get a pass here since they were designed in the 70/80's, but languages that have been designed from 2010 onwards must be ridiculed for targetting a PDP-11 era development machine where each compiler unit has limited access to resources. The end language I'm designing has smaller source files, however the compiler is a lot more complex since it auto generates the scaffolding (header files, forward declarations, etc).

It's still a fair bit away, I just got the proof of concept compiler which outputs C++ working (and the compiler is written in the language itself, so I'm dog fooding the project).




> Source files dont live on their own and shouldn't be compiled as isolated units, they live in projects and need to be compiled as a batch

Rusts compilation model is projects (called crates) that compile source files in batches.

But also, this feels like a minor implementation detail...

Maybe I'm missing your point?


Not sure what "scaffolding" you are talking about.

Rust has no headers or forward declarations, and compiles the whole project ("crate") as a single unit.


What is the cost of having that scaffolding?




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