Which systems (as in zero-runtime) language would you choose if not C (even if we disregard the fact that no SoC vendor support anything but C)?
- Ada? Many cool features, but that's also the problem - it's damn complicated.
- C++ combines simplicity of Ada with safety of C.
- Rust and Zig are only ~10 years old and haven't really stabilized yet. They also start to suffer from npm-like syndrome, which is much more problematic for a systems language.
- ATS? F#? Not all low-level stuff needs (or can afford) this level of assurance.
- Idris? Much nicer than ATS, but it's even younger than Rust and still a running target (and I'm not sure if zero-runtime support is there yet).
I mean, yes, C is missing tons of potentially useful features (syntactic macros, for one thing), but closures are not one of them.
Which functions are required for a C program to run aside from those that it run explicitly? memcpy? It's basically a missing CPU instruction. malloc will never get called unless you call it yourself.
> followed by history of systems programming languages, starting with JOVIAL in 1958.
All system languages (e. g. BLISS, PL/S, NEWT) designed as such before C was vendor-specific. Some of these had nice things missing from C, but none propagated beyond their original platform. And today we have no option but C.
> "Typescript for C" came out in 1983.
C++ is not just "not perfect", it is far worse in every way. Let's let people overload everything. And let's overload shift operator to do IO. And make every error message no less than 1000 lines, with actual error somewhere in the middle. Let's break union and struct type punning because screw you that's why. You say C macros are unreadable? Behold, template metaprogramming! C is not perfect, but it has the justification of being minimal. C++ is a huge garbage dumpster on fire.
Everything that runs before main(), and on exit, floating point emulation when needed and IEEE support, signal handlers, threading support since C11, at least, then depends on what else Compiler C has as extensions.
It is insane to assert that Rust hasn't "really stabilized yet" in comparison to C, a language which has been replaced twice (as C17 and C23) after Rust 1.0
C17 didn't introduce any changes to the language. C23 mostly standardized existing compiler-specific goodies. None of this broke existing code. When I run `sudo dnf upgrade gcc` I can be 99.9% sure my old code still compiles.
Compare e. g. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/102750/ (I'm not following Rust development closely, picked up the first one). Yes, developers do rely on non-guaranteed behavior, that's their nature. C would likely standardize old behavior. Basically all of the C standard is a promoted vendor-specific extension - for better or worse.
C17 ostensibly "didn't change" the language but it did still need to fix a bunch of stuff and it chose to do this by just issuing an entirely new language standards document.
C23 on the other hand landed a bunch of hard changes, and "it didn't break my code" only matches the reality most people observe with Rust too. The changes you mention didn't break my Rust either.
But some trivial C did break because C23 is a new language
In fact those Rust changes aren't language changes unlike C23, the first you linked is a choice for the compiler to improve on layout it didn't guarantee, anybody who was relying on that layout (and there were a few) was never promised this wouldn't change, next version, next week or indeed the next time they compiled the same code. You can even ask Rust's compiler to help light a fire under you on this by arbitrarily changing some layout between builds, so that stuff which depends on unpromised layout breaks earlier, reminding you to actually tell Rust e.g. repr(C) "I need the same layout guarantees for my type T as I'd get in C" or repr(transparent) "I need to ensure my type wrapper T has the same layout as the type I'm wrapping"
The second isn't a language change at all, it's a change to a library feature, so now we're down to "C isn't stable until the C library is forever unchanging" which hopefully you recognise as entirely silly. Needless to say nobody does that.
I'm trying to drag one program at $employer up to C99 (plus C11 _Generic), so I can then subsequently drag it to the bits of C23 which GCC 13 supports.
This all takes times, and having to convince colleagues during code reviews.
What C23 has done is authorise some of the extensions which GCC has had for some time as legitimate things (typeof, etc).
However the ability to adopt is also limited by what third party linters in use at $employer may also support.
True, at most I read excerpts when I have a question. Can you tell me what gave it away? I thought the saying is that C17 is the sane version of C11 and C23 has quite some changes, but is way to new to be counted on.
C17 is indeed a bug fix release. C23 finally removed some features that were deprecated a long time ago already in the first standardized version (auto as storage classifier, K&R function definitions, empty parenthesis as "arbitrary arguments") and also support for ones' complement. So yes, C is extremely backwards compatible.
- Ada? Many cool features, but that's also the problem - it's damn complicated.
- C++ combines simplicity of Ada with safety of C.
- Rust and Zig are only ~10 years old and haven't really stabilized yet. They also start to suffer from npm-like syndrome, which is much more problematic for a systems language.
- ATS? F#? Not all low-level stuff needs (or can afford) this level of assurance.
- Idris? Much nicer than ATS, but it's even younger than Rust and still a running target (and I'm not sure if zero-runtime support is there yet).
I mean, yes, C is missing tons of potentially useful features (syntactic macros, for one thing), but closures are not one of them.