I've got some bad experience with C++ for this. Yes, part of that was losing the flow, which is probably why way back then scripting languages were easier to sell than these days (where you can throw more money on the issue, with umpteen core dev machines).

But the other part was the reaction amongst developers to this. Layers of abstractions introduced just to please the compiler gods. C++ was particular famous for this, all for the sake of partial compilation still working -- sometimes this had the benefits of decoupling, but often it was a few cake layers on top of that.

So you end up with convenient languages, but have to forsake some of that convenience to actually be productive. But you still had to learn the convenient unused part and know the difference, even if you almost never could afford to use it (if it's just about runtime performance, you often don't need that. But you don't want to cause the projects compilation or test phase to double, just because that functional-combinatoric template metaprogramming approach is so much neater)

Oh man, if only we would have Wirth-dows, not Windows ;)

C++ compile is pretty decent nowadays, except for template heavy dependencies like boost which attempt to be header only for the most part.

I’ve been hearing about Jai for, what, maybe close to a decade already?! Is it actually gonna happen? I feel like it’s one of those languages that falls under the category of vaporware.

I don't think calling it Vaporware is accurate, since it's one person's project for their own other projects. There isn't (nor should there) be any expectation on general availability of it.

I've been following the development of this language and I am pretty sure it is not vaporware.

I think they are making a PR mistake by not making it more open, but I would be surprised if it is never released.

Zig is slow as well ??

The biggest bottleneck in Zig's case is LLVM. That's why they implement fast alternative backends for development. See: https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-relationship-llvm/

looks like the project's now abandonned :

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/projects/2

This comment suggests otherwise:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/89#issuecomment-122118...

Although I'm not sure the "self hosted compiler" is the same as "llvm free backend".

It's not. The self-hosted compiler still uses llvm, and it's still slow because of it.

"self-hosted compiler" in this case means moving all the non-LLVM code (which was previously in C++) to Zig itself.

One thing I hate about LLVM is that once you get into the ecosystem to get “another alternative” or “abandon LLVM” it’s like hell, you get all these nice cool features then implementing a custom compiler for debugging can be much much harder than that