It’s weird how whiny this post is. Like there’s zero intellectual curiosity about why C got this way, and why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written.
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.
None of the alternatives have stability. What was exemplary & idiomatic rust pre-pandemic would be churlish & rejected now and the toolchain use would be different anyway.
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.
Having just finished renovating a 140-year-old home with solid brick walls that was slowly collapsing and deteriorating due to the aforementioned professionals’ application of modern and chemically incompatible materials to it… I’m not sure I agree. It’s also why a lot of the UK’s building stock is slowly rotting with black mould right now. Literally none of the professionals I hired, before I trained them, knew how to properly repair a type of home that represents 30% of the UK building stock.
The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are:
- 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.
C99, but with a million macros backporting features from newer language versions and compiler extensions. Lovely features you don't get with ordinary c99:
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.
I hate to make judgments without a mountain of evidence, but a cursory glance of their about page honestly made me think this person likely suffers from a multitude of mental health issues.
I always thought that C was a stepping stone to learn other languages. Like Pascal, it was educational to learn. My Comp Sci courses in 1986-1990 used Turbo Pascal and Turbo C.
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
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.
- 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.
free_sized
#embed
static_assert
Types for enum
Alignof, alignas, aligned_alloc
_Atomic
>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.