Language and Runtime.
The separation of concerns between the programming language and the program itself is being muddled in the systems arising today. Hardly any new language is excluding garbage collection from its list of features—something that I’m beginning to form a negative opinion on. I spend my entire day working on top of the V8 VM. For all the complexity inside my laptop the complexity so close to the surface of what I do, V8, is the most impenetrable. The complexity arises not from the task I am attempting to accomplish: to build a fast hello-world web server. The task is simple: issue accept(2), recv(2), send(2), close(2) system calls in that order - over and over and over - but rather from the JavaScript programming language.
The features hanging off many programming languages are questionable. Does writing an ideal hello-world web server in 5 lines of code require garbage collection, operator overloading, classes, meta-programming, constructors, a user-space scheduler, coroutines? Must t