Literally all of the costs you list apply to C/C++ as well, except you have the additional hazards of having to worry about memory safety and leaks all of the time rather than only once every 5 years. Sorry, I don't find your claims plausible at all. It's just too easy to forget what you actually spend your time on.
Edit: and the most significant evidence for this is in comparing all the CVEs for C/C++ vs. memory safe languages like C#/Java.
> I've worked at a couple shops that these issues hit like a ton of bricks.
What you're missing is that 99% those shops wouldn't have existed at all if they had tried to go the C/C++ route because their products just wouldn't have gotten to a viable state. What your experience shows is that working in memory safe languages is so much easier that even average or mediocre programmers can get a viable product.
In my experience, GC'd languages leak much more frequently because people figure 'oh, the GC will take care of it for me.'
There are excellent tools for detecting memory leaks/safety issues in C, and you can even write all your own allocators for your own edification / amusement / sanity, but in a GC'd languages, you're pretty much fucked across the board. There's some tooling, but it pales in comparison to the tools available for C.
I would also like to acknowledge the topic of CVEs you brought up. Yes, mistakes in mission critical systems happen. And for those systems, maybe something with better memory safety features is more productive in the long run. The original comment I replied to suggested C can be surprisingly productive with just a few tools, which I stand by supporting.
> What you're missing is that 99% those shops wouldn't have existed at all if they had tried to go the C/C++ route [...] average or mediocre programmers can get a viable product
Hard disagree. The two places I have in mind hired average/mediocre people to do somewhat challenging graphics work. Both had interesting products that may have actually been viable (think matterport, figma) but both failed because the UX sucked .. due to what can only be described as UI jank.
Lastly, it is easy to forget what you spend time on. I ve been tracking all my bugs that took more than 30 minutes for the last 10 years. The vast majority are graphics bugs due to API misuse. Very few are memory safety bugs, especially recently.
EDIT: also, half the costs I listed were related to performance. How the fuck do you justify the statement that those apply to C? What language would you pick to have more control over the assembly the machine is running.. other than assembly I guess..
> In my experience, GC'd languages leak much more frequently because people figure 'oh, the GC will take care of it for me.'
"Frequent memory leaks" has never happened to me in 20 years of programming in GC'd languages.
> There are excellent tools for detecting memory leaks/safety issues in C
A process you don't even need in GC'd languages. I think I've had maybe a couple of non-critical leaks in those 20 years due to finalizer bugs.
> also, half the costs I listed were related to performance. How the fuck do you justify the statement that those apply to C?
The vast majority of performance issues are related to algorithmic choices. With the right choice of algorithms and data structures, any language will likely get within a constant factor of C.
Sometimes that constant factor matters, most often it does not given the added costs of eliminating that constant factor, eg. in dev time and risk of introducing bugs or security vulnerabilities. And even where it does matter, you're almost certainly better off writing the performance critical kernel in C and then calling into it from a higher level language, as is common in machine learning.
Edit: and the most significant evidence for this is in comparing all the CVEs for C/C++ vs. memory safe languages like C#/Java.
> I've worked at a couple shops that these issues hit like a ton of bricks.
What you're missing is that 99% those shops wouldn't have existed at all if they had tried to go the C/C++ route because their products just wouldn't have gotten to a viable state. What your experience shows is that working in memory safe languages is so much easier that even average or mediocre programmers can get a viable product.