Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

i would have thought 01983 was a bit early for

> many insist that C is the programming language and that it will last forever

but it's 41 years later and c is #2 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/, followed by c++, which is almost a superset. items #4, #5, and #6 use c syntax but are high-level languages, and item #7 is a redesign of c as a high-level language with different syntax by, in large part, the bell labs team that designed c in the first place. the #1 item is a high-level language that departs significantly from c syntax, but its almost-universally-used interpreter is written in c

41 years isn't forever but it's longer than computers had existed in 01983. so that's not a bad showing, especially given the thousands of programming languages that existed before c

______

(for future reference, the somewhat questionable ranking in the article i linked is currently python, c, c++, java, c#, js, golang, 'visual basic', sql, fortran, delphi/object pascal, assembly language, ruby, swift, scratch, matlab, php, kotlin, rust, and r.)

Yes, both C and Unix are amazing designs. Far from perfect, but good tools for many jobs. In my opinion, it is now time for Rust to take over. But comparing Rust to C, it took a huge amount of improvement over C to replace C.

i don't think rust has replaced c, or is likely to

preceding c, there was a large, complex, portable algol-family language capable of handling a range of applications similar to c's, called pl/1. if you read 'the elements of programming style', from about the time c was born, many of the examples are in fortran; most others are in pl/1. gary kildall's first job working on microcomputers was at intel writing pl/m, a cut-down pl/1 for microcomputers, for which he wrote cp/m, from which ms-dos grew. ibm's database db2 is still written in a dialect of pl/1 called pl/x. one of wirth's first languages was a thing called pl/360, which was a version of pl/1 with extra low-level facilities for bootstrapping a better language

in short, pl/1 was very widely used and highly influential, even though it's almost forgotten today

and that's because it kind of sucked. compiling it required a large computer and even then was slow. even at the beginning, it was highly complex, so learning it took a long time. this got worse over time as more and more features were piled onto it, often as ill-advised efficiency hacks that then couldn't be removed, because people's programs depended on them. because it was highly complex, and there were a lot of surprising problems that resulted from complex interactions of all its complex features; compiler developers improved this situation significantly by working hard to provide better error messages, but that only diminished the problem rather than eliminating it

the preceding paragraph describes rust exactly as well as it describes pl/1, so if someone succeeds in producing a c-like small, simple language that provides enough of rust's unique advantages (which are indeed very compelling) i expect that it will replace rust

i doubt it will replace c tho

In my opinion, Rust, though large, is in some sense quite minimal. Lot's of features in Rust are actually needed to allow the compiler to statically reason about memory safety.

And this is why Rust is likely going to take over from C, not because it is the most C-like design, but because it can provide static safety guarantees.

There is considerable pressure, at least for internet facing code, to show that it is safe. And that is way to hard to do (and keep doing) for C.

Of course, somebody may come up with a brilliant design. But lots of organizations don't want to wait for that. They don't want to keep writing new code in C. And Rust has by now a mature compiler, a very active community.

yes, i know the goals and achievements of rust

don't conclude there isn't a better solution just because you haven't seen one yet

I'm not saying anything about what is possible. What would be the amount of time it takes to create a new language, create a stable compiler, create a sizable community? It can easily be ten years.

There are lot's of organizations that are not going to wait ten years. And we still have to wait for the language to be designed in the first place to suggest that waiting might be an option.

And 10 years from now, the people who have running Rust code are no going to switch to a language that is similar to Rust but may have a slightly better syntax or otherwise be closer to C.

you said, 'Rust, though large, is in some sense quite minimal. Lot's of features in Rust are actually needed to allow x'

this logically entails that x is not possible without those features. if x is possible without them, they are not actually needed to allow x. so, although you hadn't noticed, you were saying a lot about what is and isn't possible

there are lots of organizations still using cobol, and people who have running cobol are not in any hurry to switch, either. but i have the luxury of not having to care

Obviously Rust has some features, like async, that are not needed for 'C with safety'.

But in my experience you need most of the other features. So any 'C with safety' will have a lot of the complexity of Rust. Though of course the syntax and defaults may be different.

At some point it becomes very subjective. Does a language need a UTF-8 string type, or is an array of 8-bit characters enough?

The research question would be, what is a minimal subset of Rust that still allows for programs that are commonly written in C to be easily written in this subset.

Some things, like the tuple type, or 'if let' can be removed, but is it still convenient to write programs without them? Closures are a bit tricky to see if they can be removed.

In any case, C struck a very good balance between being small and powerful. In my opinion Rust strikes a similar balance. Rust is a lot bigger, but it gives powerful tools to write reliable code.

it is impossible for you to have experience with better alternatives that haven't been invented yet; they are unlikely to look like subsets of rust. c is not a subset of pl/1

Indeed, I don't. But languages can be compared based on features. Even a language that doesn't exist can be described based on what features it needs to have. I'm not an expert in type systems, but there is a huge amount of research in how type systems can be described, what features you need to make a type system safe, etc.

If we compare C and PL/I then obviously the syntax differences between C and PL/I are mostly based on the taste of the language designer. But there are a lot of features in PL/I that simply have no equivalent in the C language. Either because when C was design they no longer needed to be in the language or because the features are move to the standard library.

In particular I/O is something that lots of language have as part of the language and C doesn't. So it is in many ways obvious why C a lot smaller than PL/I without losing any power.

But now we go in the opposite direction. We know what the safety outcome should be. So we can make a list of things that need to be in a 'C with safety', even if we cannot predict what the exact syntax will look like.

safety isn't achieved by adding capabilities, but by omitting capabilities. the hard part is how to avoid omitting necessary capabilities

> In particular I/O is something that lots of language have as part of the language and C doesn't. So it is in many ways obvious why C a lot smaller than PL/I without losing any power.

that's not why; often obvious things are wrong

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