Zig Got a New Elf Linker and It's Fast

For loops with a capture group. Under the hood Zig is doing bounds checking and binding the result of each iteration to the variable in the capture groups.You can add a range to that and Zig will iterate it for you. One could argue this is a "higher level" abstractation compared to a traditional for loop and accessing an array by index, but it exists because it naturally pushes developers to write more robust code.

The try keyword, being short hand for catch err return err. A Go developer might argue that it's better to be explicit and not have try. But it's a common pattern and it's far more ergonomic to use the try keyword then it is to catch and return every single time.

Shit, you could argue that the entire idea of comp time is an abstraction to allow code generation. Someone like Ginger Bill would argue you're better off writing a separate program to generate source code then use meta programming.

With the upcoming IO interface and the plans for async, it seems to me that interfaces are going to play a much more prominent role in the language. It makes sense they might want to consider abstractions that push developers towards good design when working with them.

Modula-2 and Object Pascal already did that for me, before I cared with C on MS-DOS, unfortunely one did not come with UNIX as selling point, and the other had the two industry giants that cared doing the wrong decisions.

Interfaces however are far more fundamental. Any app with components and modularization would declare intent through interfaces. Not having interfaces/traits as a language feature is like living without a hand or leg. Sure you can limp and hop, but it will get rather tiresome.

The only thing you're really losing is that the goto is bounded by an enclosing function, but that's also the case in C, C++ and other languages written by non-masochists. From a developer ergonomics perspective you _might_ want a proper goto instead of having to rely on a clunky general-purpose transformation as described above (though I've yet to see that use case), but from a transpilation perspective it's extremely easy to just treat labeled switch as a bunch of gotos, replace other control flow with gotos, and lower an entire function into something that compiles optimally.