[creativemonkeys]

A segfault lets the user know that the developer made a mistake, and where in the code it happened. Blaming C for segfaults is blaming the tool.

C is a small language with a spec designed to adapt to new hardware while remaining fast. The spec is ambiguous in precisely the places where resolving the ambiguity would mean either limiting its portability or its speed. This increases the learning curve significantly and also requires diligence on behalf of the developer, so it's high effort to write.

It's a perfectionist's language, because, if you can steer clear of the known pitfalls, you get a working piece of software that's maximally portable and fast, and fast is still what we want our tools to be.

There is a place for Zig, and Nim and Rust in this world, but there is no world in which these tools make the same trade-offs as C and end up with a faster and more portable (across hardware) language.

They can sacrifice speed to make it more difficult for the developer to make mistakes. They can sacrifice portability to make assumptions that resolve undefined behavior, which would also decrease the burden on the developer, but they will never get all three - correctness, portability and speed, so in that sense, they will never replace C, they can only hope to starve C of developers.

[samatman]

I work with power tools when I have to. A table saw is dangerous, and I won't refuse to use one on that basis. I wouldn't blame a table saw for cutting someone's thumb off.

One of these days I'll have a big project space though, and I'll put a table saw in. That table saw will be one of the fancy ones which destroys blades instead of digits, when the two come into conflict.

> There is a place for Zig [...] but there is no world in which [this tool makes] the same trade-offs as C and end up with a faster and more portable (across hardware) language.

This isn't the bar it needs to clear. It needs to be as fast and as portable. C can be the fastest possible language, and Zig could be exactly as fast (with, LLVM, say), and still be a language I would prefer because of comptime and some design choices which make it harder for me to lose a digit.

[tialaramex]

> That table saw will be one of the fancy ones which destroys blades instead of digits, when the two come into conflict.

SawStop. You can expect suddenly a lot of tool manufacturers who would have assured you ten years ago that this technology is either dangerous or compromises the saw's usefulness, will over the next ten years offer substantially the same features as the first patents run out.

[saghm]

> segfault lets the user know that the developer made a mistake, and where in the code it happened. Blaming C for segfaults is blaming the tool.

You can't even assume that most things will segfault though; with UB, you're lucky if it segfaults, since it's more noticeable and easier to debug! But there's not guarantee it will do that when you mess up.

> There is a place for Zig, and Nim and Rust in this world, but there is no world in which these tools make the same trade-offs as C and end up with a faster and more portable (across hardware) language.

I don't think anyone is arguing that a language would be faster or more portable, just that one could be written that's equally fast and portable enough to be useful for most things. I'd be happy to let C remain dominant specialized hardware if it means that the OS for my laptop, desktop, and phone can be written in something safer and as fast.

[umanwizard]

I’m not aware of any case in which unsafe Rust has any overheard over C. The advantage of Rust, then, is that you can restrict your use of `unsafe` to places where you actually care about things like the overhead of bounds checking.

[throwaway17_17]

I think your breakdown of a language is a neat idea, the decomposing of implementations by there ‘scores’ in the three areas of correctness, portability, and speed. I think I’d like to replace speed with a performance score encompassing both speed and memory footprint though. I also agree that achieving high ‘scores’ in all three areas is a relative impossibility.

For me, the best language is going to be the one that has a maximum in the performance area and is provably (at least to some reasonable measure) correct. I think portability between execution environments can be a loss for the types of things I enjoy programming.