That’s a great blog post!

> I agree with Ousterhout's critics who say that the split into scripting languages and systems languages is arbitrary, Objective-C for example combines that approach into a single language, though one that is very much a hybrid itself. The "Objective" part is very similar to a scripting language, despite the fact that it is compiled ahead of time, in both performance and ease/speed of development, the C part does the heavy lifting of a systems language. Alas, Apple has worked continuously and fairly successfully at destroying both of these aspects and turning the language into a bad caricature of Java. However, although the split is arbitrary, the competing and diverging requirements are real, see Erlang's split into a functional language in the small and an object-oriented language in the large.

I still strongly think Apple is taking the wrong approach with Swift by not building on the ObjC hybrid model more.

Your article is correct that Java/C# performance is unpredictable. But, per the OP, C/C++ performance is also unpredictable, because C/C++ doesn't reflect what a modern processor actually does; there are cases where e.g. removing a field from a datastructure makes your performance multiple orders of magnitude worse because some cache lines now alias.