Java is pretty good. Go. C because of the nature of how libraries are shipped. Just as an example:

"0 - libcurl 7.1, August 2000

1 - libcurl 7.5 December 2000

2 - libcurl 7.7 March 2001

3 - libcurl 7.12.0 June 2004

4 - libcurl 7.16.0 October 2006"

"During the first seven years of libcurl releases, there have only been four ABI breakages.

We are determined to bump the SONAME as rarely as possible. Ideally, we never do it again."

This is the attitude of what I want out of my dependencies.

Have you had an experience with Cargo, the Rust package manager? It is an absolute joy to work with, clean repeatable builds, and fast for what you are getting (speed of C++ with the correctness of Haskell).

Not really. I've played with Rust but haven't used it in anger. One thing I've noticed about my programming style is that I LOVE to learn about new languages and language features. Using a language like Go or Java forces to me concentrate on the problem at hand [which almost always something where GC is fine for what I'm working on]. That said, the Rust ecosystem seems pretty solid [except the edition stuff, that makes me very leery...]

Editions exist to guarantee forward compatibility, it's actually a really good solution to a hard problem.

It started at major version 7?

First release was major version 4, same as curl (using that name) itself.

https://curl.haxx.se/docs/history.html

I’ve been happy with the Elixir/Erlang world. Especially as a scripting/dynamic language it’s been remarkably stable from a "don’t waste my time" perspective. Core system features from years back work, and generally work with updated libraries.

Well despite a few major changes to Phoenix, but that was mostly changes to the naming patterns. It also switched to web pack which I consider a pain point of following JS development. With LiveView I only have a dozen JS deps and ~50 lines of JS so now I can get off the JS ratrace too! Well github complains about outdated npm deps. I should make a GH action for that or something.

Ruby is quite practical.

It has a decent standard library (so you don't waste tons of time evaluating/choosing libraries for basic things) and has a simple package management story with bundler, which separates what libraries you want (Gemfile) from what specific versions you happen to be using (Gemfile.lock).