[comex]

Me, because I don't want any of:

- huge binaries (or dependencies)

- slow compiles

- slow runtime

- garbage collection

- non-portability

- C++ (I just don't like it)

...pretty much every popular language other than C falls into one or more of the above.

Yeah, I know I'm fussy.

[pcwalton]

It's odd to see you saying this, given your security focus. But I suppose implicitly you're referring to UI apps that don't expose remote attack surface.

Anyhow, I used to be the same way (perhaps surprisingly given what I work on now), but I stopped once I realized that it just takes so long to do basic things in C compared to other languages. The downside of slow compilation, for example, pales in comparison to the downside of it taking a lot more code to do basic things like string manipulation.

I'd also mention that, on Windows, C has big dependencies as well (msvcrt), unless you cheat like MinGW does and use the unsupported system msvcrt.

[comex]

> It's odd to see you saying this, given your security focus. But I suppose implicitly you're referring to UI apps that don't expose remote attack surface.

I'm really quite conflicted here. I've written in the past that it can even be seen as irresponsible to write new security-sensitive programs in C/C++ when there are reasonable alternatives available, which is most of the time - and "security-sensitive" can include almost anything, given the right scenario. On the other hand, while I'm a big fan of Rust and use it for some personal projects, some things about it drive me crazy, while C's low-level nature appeals to me, so I also like to use C. I can justify this contradiction to myself easily enough, because I don't write all that much code that other people actually use, but that's something I'd like to change... :( In any case, I'm looking forward to quality-of-life improvements in Rust such as incremental compilation, which should tilt the balance more onto its side.