But this is a by-product of their initial motivation. I mean, how could they know their link times would be that much better? I know that Pike et al. worked o

But this is a by-product of their initial motivation. I mean, how could they know their link times would be that much better? I know that Pike et al. worked on compilers for Inferno, and the Ken´s C compiler used some tricks to know beforehand they could make it compile and link very fast, but they couldnt know if the language they were designing would be as fast (to compile) as C or Limbo. They could say confidently: "we could do better", but they would need more pragmatic motives, even to convince Google to support that effort. And i bet Google was struggling with C++ enginnering, specially within the newcomers on the team. I think, both things are true, but developer ergonomics play a very important factor into the why of a language and where it fits in the scheme of things.