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0 pointsrobinsonb51mo ago0 comments

To be honest I have similar reservations.

The one huge advantage of C is its ubiquity - you can use it on the latest shiny computer / OS / compiler as well as some obscure embedded platform with a compiler that hasn't been updated since 2002. (That's a rare enough situation to be unimportant, right? /laughs in industrial control gear.)

I'm wary of anything which fragments the language and makes it inaccessible to subsections of its traditional strongholds.

While I'm not a huge fan of the "just use Rust" attitude that crops up so often these days, you could certainly make an argument that if you want modern language features you should be using a more modern language.

(And, for the record, I do still write software - albeit recreationally - for computers that have floppy drives.)

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uecker1mo ago

C has its unique advantages that make some of us prefer it to C++ or Rust or other languages. But it also has some issues that can be addressed. IMHO it should evolve, but very slowly. C89 is certainly a much worse language than C99 and I think most of the changes in C23 were good. It is fine to not use them for the next two decades, but I think it is good that most projects moved on from C89 so it is also good that C99 exists even though it took a long time to be adopted. And the same will be true for C23 in the future.

throwaway17_171mo ago

I know this a four day old comment, but based on your post history I think you are probably the best person to ask to be more specific. So, you start out stating “C has its unique advantages”, an assertion I agree with but more for ‘vibes’ than because I can articulate the actual advantages (other than average compilation times). If you see this I would love to hear your list of C’s unique advantages.

uecker21d ago

My list of advantages:

  - long-term stability: the code I wrote two decades ago is still valuable to me
  - short (!) compilation times: this is a huge productivity boost
  - the language is very explicit: one can see and understand what is going on
  - mature tooling: good compilers and many other tools
  - simplicity and elegance: the language is small and not much I need to remember
  - portability: supported on many different systems
  - performance: C code can be very performance and usually it is without effort
  - lean: there is no bloat anywhere
  - interoperability: it can interoperate with everything
  - no lock-in: it does not lock you into specific frameworks or ways to do things
  - maintained using an open and (relatively) fair process: not controlled by specific companies
  - what needs to be done, can be done: there are never showstoppers

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lich_king1mo ago

> The one huge advantage of C is its ubiquity - you can use it on the latest shiny computer / OS / compiler as well as some obscure embedded platform with a compiler that hasn't been updated since 2002.

First, for all platforms supported by mainstream compilers, which includes most of embedded systems (from 8 bit to 64 bit), this is not really a concern. You're cross-compiling on your desktop anyway. You'd need to deliberately install and use gcc from the early 1990s, but no one is forcing you. Are you routinely developing software for systems so niche that they aren't even supported by gcc?

But second, the code you write for the desktop is almost never the code you're gonna run in these environments, so why limit yourself across the board? In most embedded environments, especially legacy ones, you won't even have standard libc.

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