More usefully, if you want people to use D instead, what is stopping them, what reasons do they give? How can these be mitigated, cos while I like C I sure would like something better.
By what measure would C be losing ground?
And the history of Linux kernel and Android might come to an end if Zirkon ever replaces it, then it will be no more C on Android.
Android and Fuchsia source code are public available, just as their code reviews and ongoing work to port ART to Fuchsia.
Anyone skilful to use C without creating CVEs of their own, is surely able to find that information.
When we start seeing Rust or similar being used instead of C would be a good metric and / or major OS development.
However, the word "isoteric" is more correctly spelled (in non-phonetic spelling) as esoteric. The prefix "eso-" means "inside" in Greek, as in "esothermic", or "esophagus". The prefix "iso-" means "equal", as in "isomorphism", "isosceles", "isometric", etc.
Nobody would do a project in C today with Go/Rust/C++ etc unless it's for a very specific situation
It's the one they know.
A C programmer isn't automatically going to switch to Rust for new projects that they would use C for, unless their goal is to use Rust.
The question is are people using C to program these hardware more? .. or are people gravitating towards safer compiled languages (Rust?). That's a valid question, even if the answer is "no C's usage is only increasing."
It also helps that C's standardization proceeds in ways that feel somewhat between sabotage and utter neglect.
Meanwhile, C is still the absolute best binary interop language devised by mankind.
This is not a random pet peeve, and WalterBright is as far as you can get from someone "who never wrote a line of code in C". This is the cause of numerous security bugs in the past and currently, and the reason most C material written in the 70s/80s is unsafe to be used today (mostly due to usage of strlen/etc vs strnlen/etc).
Fair warning - once you get accustomed to DasBetterC, you're not likely to want to go back to C :-)
I've been meaning to experiment with DasBetterC for a while, and I have a project C I've been wanting to migrate to something with proper strings (it's an converter for some binary file formats, but now I want it to import some obscure text formats too). Maybe that's the push I needed :)
After 20 minutes and about 250 out of 2098 lines converted, the error messages are very good and give very nice hints about what to change, I must say I prefer them to Rust's verbose messages.
DasBetterC's trial-by-fire was when I used it to convert DMD's backend from C to D.
I'm sure you already know this, but the trick to translating is to resist the urge to refactor and fix bugs while you're at it. Convert files one at a time, and after each run the test suite.
Only after it's all converted and passing the test suite can refactoring and bug fixing be considered.
Is it a rule at HN that you can't take someone else's name? Otherwise, there's no guarantee that you're talking to the "Real" Walter Bright...
... or that you're talking to that Walter Bright, come to think of it.
The GP decided, out of the blue, to accuse the author of never having written a line of C code in his life. That's kind of inappropriate in any context, IMO, but just downright laughable when the author is well-known for singlehandedly writing several compilers and a whole new language.
This is one of HN's comment guidelines. If you're not sure that someone is who you think they are, you can just ask, e.g.: "Hey, are you Walter Bright who did X and Y?"
C will still be used long after you and I and everyone here have returned to dust.
there are also people still riding horses. does not make it relevant in any way.
You're mistaking the “C” ABI with the C language. The so-called C ABI should actually be called the UNIX-derived ABI, as (i) C doesn't define an ABI and (ii) C can perfectly produce binaries using another ABI (such as e.g. the “Pascal” one, common on the DOS platform).
Nothing about Walter Bright in this statement, but some of the harshest criticisms from others I have seen of C are not from expert practitioners in C.
People who are experts and also critics seem to have a more practical, realistic, nuanced critique, that understands history and challenges to adoption, admits that the long history and difficulty of replacing C isn't exactly for no reason.
I also agree that what the standard committee has been doing for the last 20 years amounts to willful sabotage.
What about between c99 and c18? Is there anything you can think of? I think the _s() functions, advertised as security features, are a weak effort. Anything else come to mind?
Also the amount of UB descriptions just increased and are now well over 200.
Annex K was badly managed, a weak effort as you say, given that pointer and size were still handled separately, and in the end instead of coming up with a better design with struct based handles, like sds, everything was dropped.
ISO C drafts are freely available, I recommend everyone that thinks that they know C out of some book, or have only read K&R book, to actually read them.
But were they expert practitioners of C in the past? My experience is that most of the harshest criticisms of C come from former C experts who moved on to other languages because it became clear to them that C would never be fixed - Walter Bright included.
My point was that people were mistaking the comment for an attack on you, which I don't think was necessarily intended or needs to be without it being a valid point about a different set of critics.