More usefully, if you want people to use D instead, what is stopping them, what reasons do they give? How can these be mitigated, cos while I like C I sure would like something better.
Is the number of devices that C is running on a good metric? I think the number of developers or number of projects using C makes more sense to track. And then get the market share. If there are 10x more devices today than 10 years ago then I'd sure hope C was running on more devices but anything less than 10x means C is losing ground.
Thank you for the new knowledge that "eso" is pronounced similar to "iso" in some dialects of English, I didn't know that.
However, the word "isoteric" is more correctly spelled (in non-phonetic spelling) as esoteric. The prefix "eso-" means "inside" in Greek, as in "esothermic", or "esophagus". The prefix "iso-" means "equal", as in "isomorphism", "isosceles", "isometric", etc.
Many apologies - I was not being sarcastic and I'm sorry that this is how my comment came across. As chongli says I'm a native speaker of Greek and I really didn't know how "eso" is pronounced by native English speakers. I've lived for 15 years in the UK and I'm still surprised to hear how people pronounce the more obscure words in their language (some of which come from Greek).
Oops, sorry, I apologise for the mistake. I have seen too much bad behaviour on the 'net, so naturally I assumed the worst. It's a valuable lesson at the modest cost of a few karma points. (I guess I violated HN guidelines too, there. Good thing I don't have the power to downvote yet. I might have done so, and never discovered my mistake.)
You didn't cause the downvote. Really. But in any case, there are more important things in the world than HN karma. And keep up your Greek lessons. That's one language I'd love to learn, if only I had the time. But I understand it is fiendishly difficult for non-native speakers. (Source: Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen by Mary Norris.)
The same is likely true of Fortran, since Fortran code is shipped around with several Python data science libraries and included in R. Does that mean Fortran is a thriving language, or does it just mean Fortran was used a long time ago to write some important libraries that are now hard to get rid of?
Except Fortran 2018 is quite modern, supports modules, generics, and even OOP, first class support on CUDA alongside C++, whereas C18 hardly changed since C89 besides some cosmetic stuff and it is as secure as when it got used to rewrite UNIX in the early 70s.
It could be argued though that less usage means fewer stake holders to convince of the need for specific changes to the language, which helps with increased evolution. (I have only cursory knowledge of what's happening in C and none about what's happening in Pascal nowadays, just pointing out that being a smaller community might ironically help the language).
Lol C programmer since 1994 here... just started a Rust project with the specific goal of learning Rust. The project itself is just to scratch my own itch. I’d honestly probably write it in Python if I didn’t want to see what Rust was all about :)
C doesn't "run on hardware" .. unless you're talking interpreted C. Of course compiled machine code is running on more hardware but that's just a truism.
The question is are people using C to program these hardware more? .. or are people gravitating towards safer compiled languages (Rust?). That's a valid question, even if the answer is "no C's usage is only increasing."
C has been "losing ground" not because of random per peeves of those who never wrote a line of code in C but because since C's last standard update there have been other programming languages that offer developers something of value so that the trade-off between using C or any alternative starts to make technical sense.
It also helps that C's standardization proceeds in ways that feel somewhat between sabotage and utter neglect.
Meanwhile, C is still the absolute best binary interop language devised by mankind.
> C has been "losing ground" not because of random per peeves of those who never wrote a line of code in C
This is not a random pet peeve, and WalterBright is as far as you can get from someone "who never wrote a line of code in C". This is the cause of numerous security bugs in the past and currently, and the reason most C material written in the 70s/80s is unsafe to be used today (mostly due to usage of strlen/etc vs strnlen/etc).
A question: since your company also makes a C/C++ compiler (and the repo has very :), have you considered adding this addition to it, as an experimental feature, perhaps to demonstrate its usefulness to other developers and standard bodies? (Although, now that I think of it, D itself might serve the same purpose)
I don't see much point in it. I've proposed this change to C in front of several audiences, and it never received any traction. If you want to experiment with it, you can use DasBetterC, i.e. running the D compiler with the `-betterC` switch, which enables programs to be built requiring only the C Standard Library.
Fair warning - once you get accustomed to DasBetterC, you're not likely to want to go back to C :-)
> If you want to experiment with it, you can use DasBetterC, i.e. running the D compiler with the `-betterC`
I've been meaning to experiment with DasBetterC for a while, and I have a project C I've been wanting to migrate to something with proper strings (it's an converter for some binary file formats, but now I want it to import some obscure text formats too). Maybe that's the push I needed :)
After 20 minutes and about 250 out of 2098 lines converted, the error messages are very good and give very nice hints about what to change, I must say I prefer them to Rust's verbose messages.
DasBetterC's trial-by-fire was when I used it to convert DMD's backend from C to D.
I'm sure you already know this, but the trick to translating is to resist the urge to refactor and fix bugs while you're at it. Convert files one at a time, and after each run the test suite.
Only after it's all converted and passing the test suite can refactoring and bug fixing be considered.
I don't get why it hasn't gotten traction. When I read it, it was immediately obvious to me that this would be extremely helpful. I want it yesterday, and so should everyone.
Pro tip: Google the name of the person before responding to them, it can help avoid the taste of foot in your mouth which you are currently experiencing.
I’m new here, so this seems like a valid criticism to me — but judging by the number of downvotes, it may not be. Can someone explain why this comment is incorrect?
Perhaps because so many of know Walter from his work and his history here on HN? Sometimes you have to just trust that someone is who we all say they are.
What argument from authority is being made by anyone?
The GP decided, out of the blue, to accuse the author of never having written a line of C code in his life. That's kind of inappropriate in any context, IMO, but just downright laughable when the author is well-known for singlehandedly writing several compilers and a whole new language.
He never said explicitly, he was just making a general statement. Not that it matters whether he did or didn't, there's a lot of things wrong with C, it will most likely eventually disappear, but not for reasons outlined in this article. That's what he was saying.
Well, he dismissed Bright’s argument as a random pet peeve from people who haven’t written a line of code in C before, so yes, I do think he said it explicitly.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
This is one of HN's comment guidelines. If you're not sure that someone is who you think they are, you can just ask, e.g.: "Hey, are you Walter Bright who did X and Y?"
What's the implication here? I only know one COBOL developer but they seem to be doing quite well for themselves, making over $400k a year for something like 15 hours of work a week.
> Meanwhile, C is still the absolute best binary interop language devised by mankind.
You're mistaking the “C” ABI with the C language. The so-called C ABI should actually be called the UNIX-derived ABI, as (i) C doesn't define an ABI and (ii) C can perfectly produce binaries using another ABI (such as e.g. the “Pascal” one, common on the DOS platform).
Maybe people are voting this down because they think it's directed at Walter Bright in particular, but I think there is actually some truth in the harsh comment.
Nothing about Walter Bright in this statement, but some of the harshest criticisms from others I have seen of C are not from expert practitioners in C.
People who are experts and also critics seem to have a more practical, realistic, nuanced critique, that understands history and challenges to adoption, admits that the long history and difficulty of replacing C isn't exactly for no reason.
That's the way I interpreted it because it's true. A lot of the criticisms are misdirected one by people that haven't used C except being forced to use it for few assignments in school, C++ jockeys that think C is the 30 year out of date version of C that's supported by C++, and people that haven't used it at all for anything real.
I also agree that what the standard committee has been doing for the last 20 years amounts to willful sabotage.
What about between c99 and c18? Is there anything you can think of? I think the _s() functions, advertised as security features, are a weak effort. Anything else come to mind?
Nothing really, if anything VLAs have proven such a mistake that Google lead an effort to remove all instances of VLA use out of the Linux kernel.
Also the amount of UB descriptions just increased and are now well over 200.
Annex K was badly managed, a weak effort as you say, given that pointer and size were still handled separately, and in the end instead of coming up with a better design with struct based handles, like sds, everything was dropped.
ISO C drafts are freely available, I recommend everyone that thinks that they know C out of some book, or have only read K&R book, to actually read them.
> some of the harshest criticisms from others I have seen of C are not from expert practitioners in C.
But were they expert practitioners of C in the past? My experience is that most of the harshest criticisms of C come from former C experts who moved on to other languages because it became clear to them that C would never be fixed - Walter Bright included.
Yes I know, and for clarity I appreciate your work and insight, and frequently enjoy your comments here.
My point was that people were mistaking the comment for an attack on you, which I don't think was necessarily intended or needs to be without it being a valid point about a different set of critics.
