Go has garbage collector and that is not zero cost.
Rust has zero cost abstractions, so Rust is sort-of "memory safe C".
However, Rust is notoriously hard to learn, read and write in. So that sort of shows you that desugning low-level, zero-cost language is HARD
"Zero-cost" has always been about runtime cost. Other costs are not part of the slogan. Everything always has a cost!
Only sometimes. For complex enough problems I think mental burden of writing and maintaining software in less complex language will become more burdensome than the intrinsic burden that comes with more complex language.
I've seen this argument a number of times before, but always discarded it as something that only people not familiar with post-1.0 syntax could bring (cause all those ~@[Omg]s really were hard to read). Do people really still struggle with its syntax, and if so, why?
Coincidentally I personally really seem to struggle with reading sources in Go, although I'm yet to figure out why exactly it is the case and why I'm not as slow when reading sources in e.g. Perl.
let x = ~"blah";
let x = String::from("blah");The best safe C derivate is D, but there are also some minor offsprings, like safe-C or mscc or the popular cfi option, the Intel bounds-checking library or safeclib. Most C compilers let you track the buffer bounds nowadays, but rarely someone uses it.