Re:Three proposals for the C standard WG14
by geofft on Thursday June 21, 2018 @09:17AM
(#17364776)
Don't get me wrong, I like C. I don't want to write production software in C any more, but I do actually like the language a lot. Le cœur a ses raisons.
C is already mush. Maybe it wasn't in the 1980s, but it certainly has been since I first started learning C (around 2000).
I'm simply responding out of rational self-interest to recognizing that C cannot be what I want it to be, and what I want it
to be looks an awful lot like Rust (or Go, or Swift, or...).
C doesn't even have sum types with a language construct for exhaustive matching. That, by itself, makes C programming dangerous. For every NULL check unexpectedly deleted by a compiler, there are a thousand NULL checks that weren't written in the first place, because C has no mechanism to require a NULL check before using a pointer.
C is already mush. Maybe it wasn't in the 1980s, but it certainly has been since I first started learning C (around 2000).
I'm simply responding out of rational self-interest to recognizing that C cannot be what I want it to be, and what I want it to be looks an awful lot like Rust (or Go, or Swift, or...).
C doesn't even have sum types with a language construct for exhaustive matching. That, by itself, makes C programming dangerous. For every NULL check unexpectedly deleted by a compiler, there are a thousand NULL checks that weren't written in the first place, because C has no mechanism to require a NULL check before using a pointer.