Post:

If you’re still shipping load‑bearing code in C, C++, Python, or vanilla JavaScript in 2025, you’re gambling with house money and calling it “experience.”

As systems scale, untyped or foot‑gun‑heavy languages don’t just get harder to work with—they hit a complexity cliff. Every new feature is another chance for a runtime type error or a memory bug to land in prod. Now layer LLM‑generated glue code on top of that. More code, more surface area, less anyone truly understands. In that world, “we’ll catch it in tests” is wishful thinking, not a strategy.

We don’t live in 1998 anymore. We have languages that:

  • Make whole classes of bugs unrepresentable (Rust, TypeScript)
  • Give you memory safety and concurrency sanity by default (Rust, Go)
  • Provide static structure that both humans and LLMs can lean on as guardrails, not red tape

At this point, choosing C/C++ for safety‑critical paths, or dynamic languages for the core of a large system, isn’t just “old school.” It’s negligence with better marketing.

Use Rust, Go, or TypeScript for anything that actually matters. Use Python/JS at the edges, for scripts and prototypes.

For production, load‑bearing paths in 2025 and beyond, anything else is you saying, out loud:

“I’m okay with avoidable runtime failures and undefined behavior in my critical systems.”

Are you?

Comment:

Nonsense. If your code has reached the point of unmaintainable complexity, then blame the author, not the language.

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Hell, assembly code is still necessary for the lowest-level init code. Once you have a functional stack and some var init logic you can graduate to C.

    • arthropod_shift@programming.dev
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      1 hour ago

      A little hair-splicy, but an assembly-free bootloader is definitely doable on some platforms – Cortex-M processors load the stack pointer from the vector table, and the initialized memory setup can be taken care of with memcpy.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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        51 minutes ago

        True, but you’re not gonna be setting the access levels or doing anything else with control registers on a Correx-M in pure C, let alone boot to a safe state with zeroed registers.

      • rainwall@piefed.social
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        4 hours ago

        You joke, but my first “lets make facebook, but…” comment was from an electrical engineer buddy that wanted to use matlab. That was the whole pitch. “Facebook, but matlab.”

        It did not go far.