Since you have to rewrite everything, you might as well switch to another language (we switched to OCaml). If there was an incremental path or a safe subset of C or something like that, that would be more interesting.

My thoughts exactly. If nothing bad happens, I think Rust will be a worthy successor of C in low-level land. If I need a higher abstraction level, I use either Lisp if I want dynamic typing, or OCaml if I want static typing. Together, those three cover a vast spectrum.

addendum: That doesn't mean C2 is not a worthwhile experiment. I might even try it out when a compiler is available.

We have pretty good C interop, so you don't have to re-write everything, you can do it in chunks. Firefox isn't suddenly going to be reimplemented in Rust, for example, it will be library by library, bit by bit.

Of course, you can do that with some other languages too, but our lack of runtime and no-overhead makes it significantly better, in my opinion.

You can use D, which shares a lot of syntax with C, although you cannot directly reuse C code because there is no preprocessor in D. Some people use D as a "C development compiler".

The incremental path is the official C standards. C will probably gain modules for example.

In the project I'm working on right now, there are 277,617 lines of C (using gcc extensions). The incremental path either compiles all of that directly, or we rewrite it. There's hardly any middle ground, and actually rewriting it isn't a realistic option either.

(For comparison the same project has 63,972 lines of OCaml and 31,605 lines of Perl)