Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mamcx 2390 days ago
I dream of "better C" as something that I wish existed. Not a "alternative to C" like Rust or ADA (that is BETTER, but not C). I think:

- A C developer must find as low friction as possible to use it.

- It will look alike C as much as possible.

- Will not bring a big semantic/syntax departure

- Not bring any novel stuff or Gc. BetterC is C as will be written by the BEST of the developers with the BEST practiques applied, and removed (as much as possible) the most obvious mistakes or ill-advised features.

- BetterC must be/have a transpiler. Even if that break for a while perfect behaviors it provide a way to cleanly upgrade things forward. Because BetterC is well writen C, the user will be encouraged to use it with the confidence of be in the ecosystem.

- BetterC must be incorporated (eventually?) as a front-end in a C compiler (like LLVM). So is like have "strict on" available.

- This mean is better if is backed by the community as a long, step-by-step goal of C. This also mean must be done for people that actually love/like C, just want it to be better.

- Must provide a set of blessed libraries like unicode strings, arrays, numbers, dates, etc. If not in-built at least included so most that use C as all-around lang not get out (similar in this case as Rust)

- Must encourage rewrite of critical pieces of code, despite zero-cost of FFI with C.

- Fix stupid syntax issues like dangling else. This is the "easiest" part I think.

- Find the biggest issues of the langs/common libraries and kill them.

- NOT ALLOW STUPID BY DEFAULT. Bring the "unsafe" keyboard here. No excuses!

- Bring sane macros.

- Bring AGTD, pattern matching, for ... in ..., and hopefully, fast fast compile times.