[MobiusHorizons]

I'm curious what you would replace it with? I can't think of anything actually suitable for most of the low-level operating systems / embedded level things that use C.

I know people recommend rust for this kind of thing, but Rust really isn't appropriate in a lot of cases, especially when dealing with microcontrollers not supported by llvm (ie PIC, 8051 off the top of my head).

This may be changing, but I was also under the impression that Rust can't easily produce as small binaries as C can.

[kjs3]

As an alternative in your use case, there was a pretty decent Modula-2 compiler for the 8051 (Mod51). It's a small, safe language and a reasonable fit for embedded architectures. It is a Wirth-ian BEGIN...END language which for some people means it has cooties, but I wrote a some useful stuff in it a long time ago and it was pretty painless, as such things go. There's even some standardization around Modula-2 in the embedded world (IEC 61311-3 ST). Unfortunately, I don't think Mod51 is sold any more; C won in that world.

[MobiusHorizons]

very interesting

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'd nominate Pascal (which has been used for OS dev before) and Ada. Not 100% sure how broad their support is for different hardware, but it also seems like adding new platforms to an existing toolchain is less work than inventing a new language while still benefiting from being not-C.

[remexre]

I'm partial to Forth, but I think "get rid of C" is a bit of an extreme opinion...

[gHosts]

D