That must be why builds today take just as long as in the 1990s, to produce a program that makes people wait just as long as in the 1990s, despite the hardware being thousands of times faster ;)

In reality, people just throw more work at the compiler until build times become "unbearable", and optimize their code only until it feels "fast enough". These limits of "unbearable" and "fast enough" are built into humans and don't change in a couple of decades.

Or as the ancient saying goes: "Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container."

When you decouple the language from the hardware and you don't specify an abstraction model (like java vm do), "the platform" is just whatever the implementer feels like at that moment.

Endianness will be with us for a while, but modern languages don't really need to consider the other factors, so they can take significant liberties in their design that match the developer's intuition more precisely.

I think in the end it's just another story of a C++ veteran living through the inevitable Modern C++ trauma and divorce ;)

(I wonder what he's up to today, ITHare was quite popular in game dev circles in the 2010s for his multiplayer networking blog posts and books)