Most languages don't have references, and in those that do before the issue was understood, the explicitness made it a much smaller issue.
> I also don't feel it's easier to implement at all.
> One can either rewrite:
Now try lowering to bytecode or assembly instead of high-level pseudocode.
But Go and C++ do, where this issue arose with or without closures.
> Now try lowering to bytecode or assembly instead of high-level pseudocode.
It doesn't matter, because as I said, all that is already in the compiler.
It would be needlessly complex and error-prone for compilers to hardcode custom code generation for such abstractions; it's transformed to something else the compiler already understands at a far higher level. I know for a fact that in Rust, for-loops already desugar to a simple infinite loop construct with a break at the H.I.R. level and all further optimizations only happen from there.
The only explanation I see is that they really gave it no thought at all whatsoever and it wasn't a tradeoff but simply not thinking clearly.