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Comment by szastamasta | Hacker News Reader

I also have mixed feelings about Rust. It gives me too many flashbacks from Scala. Complex types, a lot of generics, same elitist attitude. I just think it will end up the same way as Scala. Few years of hype and now we have plenty of unmaintainable codebases from wannabe functional zealots.

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I like other communities experimenting new ways. And the Rust lesson will not be forgotten even if Rust will be replaced by something else. However what I do not understand is, given the enormous code base written in C, the fact it will be used more in the future regardless of Rust and other alternatives, is why we don't fix C, at the same time. Create a standard project, within the ANSI C, to write a new, solid, modern standard library for C. Change the language behaviour so that the default compilation target is full of defined behaviours for all the common edge cases, and you can enable an "UB mode" only for speed and if you know what you are doing. And so forth.

This would be really cool. If there would be a more modern version of C, made by C standard committee. Without UB and with small, but robust stdlib. It would have to stay compatible on ABI level, but source level I think we can skip.

For me Zig looks like something that could become a new C. They aim for great C binary and source compatibility (both ways - called and callable from C). It’s planned to be small and lean. And avoid preprocessor and UB as much as possible.

I suspect the problem is as always, political. The standards committee is dominated by compiler vendors, who at this point are desperate to cast C in the dustbin of history, or at least put it in deep freeze, and are eager to push their other favoured languages like C#, C++ and so on. Therefore the committee has decided to please all parties by pleasing none, i.e., keep C stagnated, with only minimal changes that everyone manages to agree on, essentially relegated to embedded work and legacy code maintenance. And as long as C remains under ISO's grip, this won't change, sadly. C needs a rejuvenation and ISO is the last place to make it happen.

I didn't want to say it, but that's what I think as well.

Absolutely true. C might have its own way of evolution to Modern C with quite a good standard library and mature features, but people who stay behind C++ don't want this, and even though some of them behave really aggressively if some languages like Rust or Zig or Modern C (unfortunately this is will never ever happened) try to replace C++ or take even a little piece of the pie.

C++ is not a bad language at least because lots of amazing soft already written on it, but some people accept it with all of the myriads of complex rules with their own subset and some people totally disagree with this and just want Better(Modern) C with plain and simple rules without hidden complex things which happened behind the scene, and counterintuitive features.

About Rust is everything cool except sometimes it doesn't allow you to write correct code and push you to do things in ways that you don't like. But we are programmers and some part of us is a painter :)

Both suggestions require companies to invest a lot of their resources (money, time) on something that seemingly is not particularly interesting to them. The former suggestion being somewhat realistic but the latter one I think not very much so. C++ was/is what the companies chose to put their money in to.

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