[0] some languages get a bye for some reason e.g. MRI and JRuby, but no pypy, and which implementation is blessed is also arbitrary e.g. javascript is v8 but lua is lua.
Not true.
Back-in-the-day Joe LaFata contributed specially written-for PyPy pi-digits, spectral-norm, mandelbrot programs and they were all shown on the website side-by-side with the CPython programs.
Back-in-the-day I noticed the Python n-body program failed with PyPy, I asked about the problem and was told "we have nbody_modified in our benchmarks" and then I asked them to contribute the specially modified for PyPy program -- and it was displayed on the website within 3 hours.
https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2010/03/introducing-pypy-12-re...
C needs to defend its reputation now!
So no hard feeling involved.
There is no reputation to defend. You mean security problems everywhere ? do you mean old, broken, nasty build systems ? Do you mean not having single good package management ? The language (C/C++) is clearly intractable (parsing wise), it is 2017 and we don't have single good IDE for them (I don't use IDE at all, but I am sure you agree with me how much an IDE is important for newcomers)
If that is the case I think writing assembly would outperform C like shit, and with that logic asm is much better than C.
And to be honest, I am in job finding phase and preparing for jobs, if this wasn't my plan right now, I would abandoned C and C++ (even C++{11,14}) for Rust in heartbeat.
The language (Rust) clearly is awesome language, well designed, does have perfect build system (have you seen Cargo ? it is wonderful), flexible language design (you can write OS in rust -not having runtime- and you can write web app in Rust). I am stuck with C and C++ for now, but if my opinion counts , Rust is superior in every aspect to C/C++.
Even if Rust were slower a little bit (+/- 10%) I wouldn't mind. Because its ecosystem is so healthy I would trade 10% of my program performance to having something as nice as Rust.
Kind-of: Node.js actually.
