[pjc50]

The scale of C adoption is certainly unparalleled over the past 40 or so years, but so are the safety issues in the cyberwarfare era.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/pre...

If, somehow, we'd got to an era where (a) operating systems were widely deployed in a different language, and (b) the Morris Worm of 1988 had happened due to buffer overflow issues, then C in its current form would never have been adopted.

[mjburgess]

C is just convenient assembly. In an era where performance mattered, and much software was written for hardware, and controlling hardware, it's hard to see an alternative.

C's choices were for performance on hardware-limited systems. I don't really see what other ones made sense historically.

[pjc50]

C is, in some important cases, less convenient than assembly in ways which have to be worked round either fooling the compiler or adding intrinsics. A recent example: https://justine.lol/endian.html

Is the huge macro more convenient than the "bswap" instruction? No, but it's portable.

> I don't really see what other ones made sense historically.

Pascal chose differently in a couple of places. In particular, carrying the length with strings.

C refused to define semantics for arithmetic. This gave you programs which were "portable" so long as you didn't mind different behavior on different platforms. Good for adoption, bad for sanity. It was only relatively recently they defined subtraction to be twos-complement.

16-bit Windows even used C with the Pascal calling convention. http://www.c-jump.com/CIS77/ASM/Procedures/P77_0070_pascal_s...

[another2another]

>In an era where performance mattered, and much software was written for hardware, and controlling hardware, it's hard to see an alternative

Actually, what made sense _was_ assembly when performance mattered above all. C was actually seen as a higher level language.

However C's advantage was the fact that it was cross platform, so you could compile or quite easily port the same code to many different platforms with a C compiler (Solaris,Windows,BSD,Linux and latterly Mac OSX). That was its strength (pascal shared this too, but it didn't survive).

You can see this in the legacy of software that's still in use today - lots of gnu utilities, shells, X windows, the zlib library, the gcc, openssl and discussed fairly recently POV Ray which has been going since the 80's.

[kelnos]

> C is just convenient assembly.

I'm not sure if you're being facetious here, but that's absurd. It is certainly one of our lowest-level options before reaching for assembly, but it's still a high-level language that abstracts machine details from the programmer.

> In an era where performance mattered, and much software was written for hardware, and controlling hardware, it's hard to see an alternative.

During that era, people who really needed to care about performance used assembly. The optimizations done by C compilers at that time were not nothing, but they were fairly primitive to what they do now.