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Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by clktmr on Saturday January 11, 2020 @05:19PM (#22022761)
Despite all of its limitations, C still has no viable alternatives in many areas.

And personally I now really appreciate the persistence of C in contrast to all the changes and new features in other languages.

Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by ncmncm on Saturday January 11, 2020 @07:26PM (#22023475)
There is literally no place where C has no viable alternative.
Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by coldtea on Saturday January 11, 2020 @09:06PM (#22023950)
If you take account quality and maturity of compilers, number of alternative implementations, support, quality of tooling, availability of architectures, number of practicing programmers, libs, existing interfaces and OSes supporting it, and so on, there are tons of places...
Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by ncmncm on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:16AM (#22024985)
There are many languages that can be transcribed to C. So, if you have C, you have every other such language, only a makefile entry away.

Furthermore most environments that seem to have only C are a Gcc target, and then you have access to all the other languages Gcc can compile, without a detour to C.

Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by clktmr on Sunday January 12, 2020 @08:54AM (#22026263)
Even if it's possible, the change is not worth it.

Transcribing leads to a horrible debug experience. Immature languages maintained by a single/few are a no-go. Your team already knows C and is good at it, finding new programmers is easy.

You don't want another language, even if it's supported by GCC. If you want anything from C, then it's more safety guarantees. And C is flexible enough to run a better type system on top of it, e.g. look at what the kernel community is doing with `sparse`.

Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by ncmncm on Monday January 13, 2020 @06:52AM (#22033622)
If you want to use C, use C.

But to insist there is no alternative is just untrue, and (after you have been corrected) dishonest.

Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by clktmr on Monday January 13, 2020 @06:00PM (#22039709)
We were talking about viable alternatives.
Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by ncmncm on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @11:48PM (#22051828)
As I said.
Re:2019's Fastest Growing Programming Language Was C, Says T... by 0xdead on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:06PM (#22028392)
I can say that for every language on earth. C is the best of the alternatives in a lot of areas. And yes, C++ is almost always a bad alternative to C.