You need also factor development time and ease of finding developers willing to work in a specific language. There are other factors like readability of the code (very verbose languages are likely to be worse) and cost of maintenance - languages forcing a lot of abstractions are likely much worse.
This even more strongly favors Rust or Swift. Nobody is writing C or even Objective-C in 2026 as a growth language.
I hope that changes over time, since I definitely agree that the downsides of C-family languages massively outweigh the downsides of competitor languages.
C could have gotten slices already in the 90's, the concept already existed in other languages, and even Dennis Ritchie made a fat pointer proposal into that sense.
The others, let see if anything related to profiles actually gets into C++29.
Citation needed. I don't think there's a correlation there. Over-architected Java spaghetti is verbose and unmaintainable. Under-architected Perl code golf that metastisized is terse and unmaintainable.
> languages forcing a lot of abstractions are likely much worse
Citation needed. C++ has had some very high-level abstractions on top of a low-level runtime for awhile, and plenty of people have decided to use it and hire for it regardless. What counts as an "abstraction" or "forced abstraction" is a very very subjective topic.
The problem is the lack of interest since Morris worm came to be, to provide better mechanisms in said languages, until governments and key big tech names decided it was time to change existing practices.