> Taking the option of "I'll just build everything myself" then is not really a viable process in today's world, where all of your competitors will be using tons of prebuilt stuff (unless, perhaps, you have the productivity of someone like Fabrice Bellard, but the reason he's so well known is because his abilities are so rare).
Along with a sibling comment [1] that disagrees with you, I want to add that I am starting to do this myself.
I am close to 30, and I would not say I'm particularly productive. In fact, I would say that I am far below average on what most programmers call "productivity," by which they usually mean "amount of code written." I write code slowly. But I write good code.
My library of stuff is basically made to work on POSIX C and Win32 C, with no other dependencies, including the build system. It has resizable arrays, hashmaps, structured concurrency, trees, UTF-8 strings, string builders, filesystem handling, linked lists, a stack allocator (per-thread), stacks, a self-designed config language, and a pool allocator. Oh, and as mentioned, I'm well on the way to having a build system in there too, with a bootstrap process that depends on nothing more than either MSBuild, a Windows batch file, or a POSIX sh script, meaning that bootstrap itself has no other dependencies other than a minimal OS configuration.
A few months ago, I was writing a compiler in Python (with lark), thinking that I would write the compiler faster that way. Only recently did I try again with C, using my libraries. It turns out that I'm just as fast in C as in Python because I understand my entire stack.
Because of that, I think that my sibling comment is correct that the option of "I'll just build everything myself" is going to be viable for people with less productivity of Fabrice Bellard. In fact, maybe understanding his whole stack is what makes Fabrice Bellard as productive as he is.
I wouldn't worry about speed. As you progress through your career, you'll get very good, at writing very good code, very quickly.
These days (I'm 59), I can bang out a full-fat native Swift app in a few days, with excellent code (and operational) quality, great UX, high maintainability, accessibility, localizability, customizability, etc.
Along with a sibling comment [1] that disagrees with you, I want to add that I am starting to do this myself.
I am close to 30, and I would not say I'm particularly productive. In fact, I would say that I am far below average on what most programmers call "productivity," by which they usually mean "amount of code written." I write code slowly. But I write good code.
My library of stuff is basically made to work on POSIX C and Win32 C, with no other dependencies, including the build system. It has resizable arrays, hashmaps, structured concurrency, trees, UTF-8 strings, string builders, filesystem handling, linked lists, a stack allocator (per-thread), stacks, a self-designed config language, and a pool allocator. Oh, and as mentioned, I'm well on the way to having a build system in there too, with a bootstrap process that depends on nothing more than either MSBuild, a Windows batch file, or a POSIX sh script, meaning that bootstrap itself has no other dependencies other than a minimal OS configuration.
A few months ago, I was writing a compiler in Python (with lark), thinking that I would write the compiler faster that way. Only recently did I try again with C, using my libraries. It turns out that I'm just as fast in C as in Python because I understand my entire stack.
Because of that, I think that my sibling comment is correct that the option of "I'll just build everything myself" is going to be viable for people with less productivity of Fabrice Bellard. In fact, maybe understanding his whole stack is what makes Fabrice Bellard as productive as he is.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29524030