I’ve programmed in C for 20+ years and then recently switched to rust. When fellow C programmers ask me how Rust is going, I say “it’s modern” and “it’s consistent”. What I mean by that unlike C, Rust doesn’t have 50 years of baggage: string functions that handle null termination all differently, complicated implicit promotion rules, null-terminated strings that haven’t been a good idea for decades, apis that we’re completely busted by posix threads but still exist, functions that cannot be used safely that still exist, code snippet examples with horribly broken unsafe code that beginners copy-paste, dubious and bad type-based aliasing, rampant use of UB, etc etc etc
Sadly Rust is not a better C. Maybe it’ll grow into one some day. Today it’s a better C++. Sadly I’d still chose C to do C’s job.
All I want from “better C” is to fix the obviously bad problems from C’s history. Or rather, maybe that’s the committee’s job.
At any rate: it’s embarrassing that we’re still so dependent on a language that’s so broken. And it’s sad that there doesn’t seem to be a path forward.