The tradeoff always was to use higher level languages to increase development velocity, and then pay for it with larger and faster machines. Moore’s law made it where the software engineer’s time and labor was the expensive thing.

Moore’s law has been dying for a decade, if not more, and as a result of this I am definitely seeing people focus more on languages that are closer to hardware. My concern is that management will, like always, not accept the tradeoffs that performance oriented languages sometimes require and will still expect incredible levels of productivity from developers. Especially with all of nonsense around using LLMs to “increase code writing speed”

I still use Python very heavily, but have been investigating Zig on the side (Rust didn’t really scratch my itch) and I love the speed and performance, but you are absolutely taking a tradeoff when it comes to productivity. Things take longer to develop but once you finish developing it the performance is incredible.

I just don’t think the industry is prepared to take the productivity hit, and they’re fooling themselves, thinking there isn’t a tradeoff.