Re:After All These Years, the World Is Still Powered by C Pr...
by coldtea on Sunday April 02, 2017 @10:31AM
(#14017299)
>the reality is that the only reason why C is still around is the long history it has and the dominant position it used to have.
Those are not idle historical reasons.
They actively translate in important benefits that other languages lack.
Like multiple vendor support, fast compilers, great tooling, editor/IDE support, numerous libs, easy cross platform portability, good documentation, lots of available work, and lots of other things besides.
Even if Rust is a safer/better C/C++, for example, it still lacks most of this things. It's a single vendor language, tied to LLVM (with whatever this implies for the platforms it supports), it has lacking tooling and support, etc.
Those are not idle historical reasons.
They actively translate in important benefits that other languages lack.
Like multiple vendor support, fast compilers, great tooling, editor/IDE support, numerous libs, easy cross platform portability, good documentation, lots of available work, and lots of other things besides.
Even if Rust is a safer/better C/C++, for example, it still lacks most of this things. It's a single vendor language, tied to LLVM (with whatever this implies for the platforms it supports), it has lacking tooling and support, etc.