> That's fair, but to me what drags C and C++ really down for me is the difficulty in building them. As I get older I just want to write the code and not mess with makefiles or CMake. I don't want starting a new project to be a "commitment" that requires me to sit down for two hours.

Also, integrating 3rd party code has always been one of the worst parts of writing a C or C++ program. This 3p library uses Autoconf/Automake, that one uses CMake, the other one just ships with a Visual Studio .sln file... I want to integrate them all into my own code base with one build system. That is going to be a few hours or days of sitting there and figuring out which .c and .h files need to be considered, where they are, what build flags and -Ddefines are needed, how the build configuration translates into the right build flags and so on.

On more modern languages, that whole drama is done with pip install or cargo install.

Starting doesn't need to be more difficult than:

  .PHONY: all

  all:
       cc -o progname -std=c99 -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -O0 *.c

Or something along those lines. Move some stuff to variables (CC, CFLAGS, etc.) for release. Can use object files for larger programs (but often isn't needed, certainly not when starting out).

I do agree that the general experience of Rust is a lot better. But I also think a lot of C projects have overcomplicated build systems that aren't really needed.

> boy does the JVM suck outside of server deployments

Does it? Why? Is it significantly worse than any other language that needs a runtime like Python or Node?

`java -jar foo.jar MainClass` doesn't seem all that bad. Plus you can wrap it in a trivial shell script if you want.