alt Hacker NewsSpeed and security are not good bedfellows. Combine that with really shitty standards and dozens of years of development...
Oh, and licensing. Licensing is the real killer. I could just write my own mp3 decoder easily (the format not the file type) but I'm not gonna risk my company getting sued into the ground by doing that.
I don’t think this is necessarily true! Constraints can be liberating: a language that allows strong encoding of invariants makes it easier for the language’s compiler to optimize.
I agree about long periods of development and difficult standards, though.