[TheOtherHobbes]

OK - but it's not the 1970s any more. Modern hardware is many orders of magnitude faster than it used to be. (If you check the numbers it's not just a linear jump in clock rate of a thousand or so, but a multiplier of another 10 or 100 because of pipelining, faster memory, larger caches, and bigger word sizes.)

So why are we still using a language designed as a quick hack in the 70s and which is a dinosaur now?

Beyond that - why are we still using the ideas from that period without modernising them? Why are so many 1970s constraints and hacks baked into POSIX and OS features when modern issues - security, stability, consistency, reliability, multi-national localisation and support, and so on - should be taking precedence?

[MaxBarraclough]

You're right of course that hardware has improved immensely, but I'm not sure what your point was. There are plenty of domains where performance is still of great importance, and C still has excellent performance.

I think the real point is that modern languages can significantly improve on the major issues with C, particularly its undefined behaviour and how that translates to real-world security issues, without significantly impacting performance. Rust (and in particular its Safe Rust subset) has been competing more with C++ than with C, but the point is still there.

I admit though that I don't have hard numbers on what would be the performance cost of writing an OS (for example) in Rust rather than C.

[ogogmad]

Zig is apparently not much more complicated than C. It's got the same focus on low-level programming and manual memory management as C does. Doesn't support operator overloading though, and probably never will. :(

[MaxBarraclough]

I didn't mention Zig because as far as I know there's no Safe Zig subset, nor are there plans to develop one. Zig itself is an unsafe language. [0][1]

That's the nice thing about Safe Rust, it's a proper safe language akin to Java and JavaScript, while retaining high performance, plain old ahead-of-time compilation, and no garbage collector. Zig isn't playing the same game.

[0] https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537693

[tremon]

Arguably, it's not the prevalence of the language per se that's the problem: it's that the C function call interface has become the de-facto interop language for all shared libraries, which also means that every other language (whether it's Ada, Pascal, Rust, Python, Ocaml or Haskell) has to support the dinosaur-age ideas or exist only in its own niche.

[michaelcampbell]

> OK - but it's not the 1970s any more

Sure, but that can be taken both ways. eg: "then stop griping about a language that was at the top of the heap in the 70's".

[lifthrasiir]

It should rather be "then stop using a language that was at the top of the heap in the 70's". The entire discussion around C happens because C is still actively being used.