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Comment by vmchale | Hacker News Reader

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vmchale·

> some inexplicable reason C also has a quite decent reputation

if you think like this, you will never replace C...

> Using C outside a kernel or existing C project today is professional negligence.

or embedded development lol

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C has been in the process of being replaced for decades. I specifically mentioned kernels and legacy projects, because these are its last retreats; even embedded has lost a large chunk to C++.

Here's a silly prediction: in the next 10 years a significant number of C programmers will retire without replacement. The new generations will rather learn Go, C++ and Rust for low-level stuff and will banish C to pure legacy projects.

I disagree about replacement programmers--at the moment, practically every graduating electrical engineer and computer engineer will have a working knowledge of C. Embedded C has lost some ground to C++, but primarily in ARM and x86 architectures, since for more memory constrained AVR/PIC/etc. microcontrollers, you absolutely avoid template inheritance because vtables are untenable, there often isn't an available STL for the chip toolchain anyways, templates balloon the program space, and you are still constrained to using just stack allocation. That right there pretty much means there will always be a space where C is more pragmatic.

I see this pattern a lot on HN. Many aren't aware that there are fields alive and well that require the use of unsafe, deterministic C that can compile to programs on the order of kb.

Fully agree with you.

Although not politically correct, that is the only way to overcome religious resistance against new technologies.

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