[benreesman]

Not the parent but one imagines that WASM could be a good target for decompressing or otherwise decoding less-adopted formats/protocols because WASM is fairly broadly-adopted and seems to be at least holding steady if not growing as an executable format: it seems unlikely that WASM disappears in the foreseeable future.

Truly standard ANSI C along with a number of other implementation strategies (LLVM IR seems unlikely to be going anywhere) seem just as durable as WASM if not more, but there are applications where you might not want to need a C toolchain and WASM can be a fit there.

One example is IIUC some of the blockchain folks use WASM to do simultaneous rollout of iterations to consensus logic in distributed systems: everyone has to upgrade at the same time to stay part of the network.

[wizzwizz4]

Wasm is simple, well-defined, small enough that one person can implement the whole thing in a few weeks, and (unlike the JVM) is usable without its standard library (WASI).

LLVM isn't as simple: there's not really such thing as target-independent LLVM IR, there are lots of very specific keywords with subtle behavioural effects on the code, and it's hard to read. I think LLVM is the only full implementation of LLVM. (PNaCl was a partial reimplementation, but it's dead now.)

ANSI C is a very complicated language and very hard to implement correctly. Once Linux switches to another language or we stop using Linux, C will go the way of Fortran.

Part of archiving information has always been format shifting. Never think you can store information, forget about it for a thousand years (or even five), and have it available later.

[benreesman]

I think we probably agree about most things but I’ll nitpick here and there.

ANSI C is among the simpler languages to have serious adoption. It’s a bit tricky to use correctly because much of its simplicity derives from leaving a lot of the complexity burden on the author or maintainer, but the language specification is small enough in bytes to fit on a 3.5” floppy disk, and I think there are conforming implementations smaller than that!

You seem to be alluding to C getting replaced by Rust as that’s the only other language with so much as a device driver to its name in the Linux kernel. Linus is on the record recently saying that it will be decades before Rust has a serious share of the core: not being an active kernel code tribute I’m inclined to trust his forecast more than anyone else’s.

But Rust started at a complexity level comparable to where the C/C++ ecosystem ended up after 40 years of maintaining substantial backwards compatibility, and shows no signs of getting simpler. The few bright spots (like syntax for the Either monad) seem to be getting less rather than more popular, the bad habits it learned from C++ (forcing too much into the trait system and the macro mechanism) seem to have all the same appeal that template madness does to C++ hackers who don’t know e.g. Haskell well. And in spite of the fact that like 80% of my user land is written in Rust, I’m unaware of even a single project that folks can’t live without that’s married to Rust.

Rust is very cool, does some things very well, and it wouldn’t be hard to do a version of it without net-negative levels of opinionated on memory management, but speaking for myself I’m still watching Nim and V and Zig and Jai and a bunch of other things, because Rust takes after its C++ heritage more than its Haskell heritage, and it’s not entrenched enough in real industry to justify its swagger in places like HN.

The game is still on for what comes after C: Rust is in the lead, but it’s not the successor C deserves.

[wizzwizz4]

Yeah, Rust may be a suitable C++ replacement, but it's not a suitable C replacement. (Arguably, C isn't a suitable C replacement…)

[benreesman]

You've made the point much, much better than I did. Well said.