[ratww]

> C has been "losing ground" not because of random per peeves of those who never wrote a line of code in C

This is not a random pet peeve, and WalterBright is as far as you can get from someone "who never wrote a line of code in C". This is the cause of numerous security bugs in the past and currently, and the reason most C material written in the 70s/80s is unsafe to be used today (mostly due to usage of strlen/etc vs strnlen/etc).

[WalterBright]

Frankly I never would have made the proposal if I didn't love C. I've made proposals to add D features to C++, too.

[ratww]

A question: since your company also makes a C/C++ compiler (and the repo has very :), have you considered adding this addition to it, as an experimental feature, perhaps to demonstrate its usefulness to other developers and standard bodies? (Although, now that I think of it, D itself might serve the same purpose)

[WalterBright]

I don't see much point in it. I've proposed this change to C in front of several audiences, and it never received any traction. If you want to experiment with it, you can use DasBetterC, i.e. running the D compiler with the `-betterC` switch, which enables programs to be built requiring only the C Standard Library.

Fair warning - once you get accustomed to DasBetterC, you're not likely to want to go back to C :-)

[ratww]

> If you want to experiment with it, you can use DasBetterC, i.e. running the D compiler with the `-betterC`

I've been meaning to experiment with DasBetterC for a while, and I have a project C I've been wanting to migrate to something with proper strings (it's an converter for some binary file formats, but now I want it to import some obscure text formats too). Maybe that's the push I needed :)

After 20 minutes and about 250 out of 2098 lines converted, the error messages are very good and give very nice hints about what to change, I must say I prefer them to Rust's verbose messages.

[WalterBright]

Great!

DasBetterC's trial-by-fire was when I used it to convert DMD's backend from C to D.

I'm sure you already know this, but the trick to translating is to resist the urge to refactor and fix bugs while you're at it. Convert files one at a time, and after each run the test suite.

Only after it's all converted and passing the test suite can refactoring and bug fixing be considered.

[zestyping]

I don't get why it hasn't gotten traction. When I read it, it was immediately obvious to me that this would be extremely helpful. I want it yesterday, and so should everyone.