# If it compiles, it runs
# And when it runs, it’s very stable
Modula-2 40 years ago. The ship had strong bones to build upon a long time ago, but alas, C. The tyranny of the masses.
Modula-2 40 years ago. The ship had strong bones to build upon a long time ago, but alas, C. The tyranny of the masses.
On my piece of the world we were mostly using BASIC, Pascal dialects, Clipper, until Windows 3.x took over and make C relevant, alongside Petzold's book.
And by then, many of us would rather use Borland compilers with Object Windows Library in C++ and Turbo Pascal, than deal with Win16 directly.
Naturally on UNIX land it was another matter.
Languages that cared about compilation speed from the start.
And it shows.
I like Rust, I use it as much as I can. But, it actually doesn't bring many new features to the table. What it's done is successfully learn from the past, scooping up the good ideas and ditching the bad ones. Its real selling point is how it wraps all of those old ideas up into a modern, well-maintained, stable package that's ready for use in the real world.
Which is no small feat. I wish OCaml cleaned house and settled on just one stdlib and removed a lot of legacy baggage, and oh yeah, add built-in Unicode support, and 5-6 other things I am forgetting now.
Sure you can muscle through all that but having Rust around really makes you wonder if it's worth it and in my case I ultimately arrived at "nope, it is not" so I just use Elixir, Golang and Rust.
In Modula-2, the equivalent to unsafe code blocks is IMPORT SYSTEM module.
EDIT: For those that aren't aware, GCC finally got GNU Modula-2 as part of the official set of frontends and no longer a side project, bring up to four (D, Go, Ada, Modula-2), the set of safer languages out of the box on a full GCC install.