[fragbait65]

Well, I agree that you can wish that the tool was better designed, that's a whole different thing though.

What I meant to say, in a rather roundabout way to be fair, is that the problem is both the language and the programmers. C is a tool that is too hard to use correctly, but the programmers who write crappy C code are to blame for their crappy code. It's another thing if an expert fails to use the tool safely, then one might blame the design of the tool used.

There seems to be 2 camps, one camp blames C and one camp blame it on poor programmers. Poor programmers have given C a reputation and the tool itself is too hard to use correctly, even for experts, so both camps are right and also wrong...

I think some of the decisions made for C back in the day where fine, C was designed to be lightning fast and close to the metal, but I think it's time to pivot. I don't think it's necessary to sacrifice security to squeeze out the last percent of "speed" today. C has a lot of legacy code still in use though, so I don't think it will ever happen, that's why I use other languages for production code today and only write C when needed for C code bases still in use.

[flohofwoe]

There's a lot of room to explore between C and Rust, while not compromising on low-level features and performance (e.g. "performance" and "safety" are both not absolutes, and also not excluding each other. I hope that there will be many new languages (the more the merrier) exploring that space.

But we'll live for a very long time with C code, it will most likely outlive us all, because important infrastructure code is never really replaced, it just becomes a new sediment layer.

[pjmlp]

Which is why stuff like Checked C, or something like SDS should really be made part of C, as UNIX clones are going to outlive us anyway.

However just like rotating blade covers, butcher metal gloves, seat belts, helmets,..., apparently external forces like government regulations are required to make WG14 act accordingly.

[pjmlp]

It was already known to Dennis and Ritchie that C without appropriate tooling wasn't an ideal tool, hence why C's history of static analysis goes all the way back to 1979.

Unfortunately, the large majority to this day thinks they don't need such kind of tooling.

"Although the first edition of K&R described most of the rules that brought C's type structure to its present form, many programs written in the older, more relaxed style persisted, and so did compilers that tolerated it. To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions. "

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html