Carpenters, plumbers, masons & electricians work on houses 3-300 yrs old, navigate the range of legacy styles & tech they encounter, and predictably get good outcomes.
Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. C99, baby, why pay more?
When there’s an alternative that can compete with that sort of real-world durability, C will get displaced.
free_sized
#embed
static_assert
Types for enum
Alignof, alignas, aligned_alloc
_Atomic
- People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or applications in higher level programming languages.
- C hit a perfect balance of being a small enough language to grok, being indepedent of the system manufacturers, reflecting the computer architecture of 80s, actually small in syntax and code length and quite easy to implement compilers for. This caused lots of legacy software being built into the infrastructure that gave birth to the current contemporary popular OSes and more importantly the infrastructure of the Internet. Add in .com bubbles and other crises, we basically have/had zero economic incentive to replace those systems.
- Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well.
It doesn't mean that people haven't tried or even succeeded. Android was successful in multiple fronts in replacing C. Its "intents" and low level interface description language for hardware interfaces are great replacement for C ABI. Windows' COM is also a good replacement that gets rid of language dependence. There are still newer OSes try like Redox or Fuchsia.
I could write a whole essay about why, but now isn’t the time. I’m just going to enjoy the fact that TFA and the author don’t get it.
Choose your own adjective
>Furry avatar
>"About Me I am Aria Desires, Gankra, and a cat."
I seem to recall reading this before, I must have not noticed this furry stuff because I would have ignored it.
My take was that this is a rustacean who was having trouble porting something to C and then went in a deep rabbit hole of C traiditional software, and instead of recognizing that perhaps they are in way over their head, they concluded that the issue was in the C, that it's all wrong and therefore their mission of porting stuff to Rust is even more virtuous.
orionblastar•1h ago
twangist•45m ago