| "What's different in 2021 that will make it succeed now when it failed in 2014? If anything, there's less interest now, as there are viable alternatives and increased investment in tools that work with standard C." You may be right, but many things could conceivably change. Viable alternatives like Rust may result in C losing ground and feeling pressure to keep up. Some huge corporation could announce a focus on security and that they will try to minimize C usage. More people could adopt the goal of a "friendly dialect of C", and be more determined or successful. Compiler developers could somehow step over the line -- make a compiler that makes such wild optimizations that it results in a backlash. Or it could just be improved very gradually, with little bits of the "friendly dialect" being adopted one by one rather than all at once. I'm not saying by any means I'm confident in anything of the sort, but things change a lot over time. Back when I was getting started, Perl was everywhere. Today pretty much nobody does big Perl projects anymore. It had a big miss with Perl 6, and that was bad enough that it got overtaken by competition. While C is much bigger and more resilient I think it's not impossible by any means for it to feel pressure to adapt. I definitely expect a lot of resistance to change, but the world changes nonetheless. |