[Retro_Dev]

It is my opinion that even if Zig were nothing more than a syntactical tweak of C, it would be preferable over C. C has a lot of legacy cruft that can't go away, and decades of software built with poor practices and habits. The status-quo in Zig is evolving to help mitigate these issues. One obvious example that sets Zig apart from C is error handling built into the language itself.

[uecker]

What specific legacy cruft does bother you? I think it is a strength of C that it evolves it slowly and code from decades ago will still run.

I also do not see how having decades of legacy software is holding anybody back doing new stuff in C in a better way. New C code can be very nice.

[pjmlp]

So slowly that what allowed for Morris worm is still present in C23, and now everyone is rushing into hardware memory tagging as a solution instead.

[uecker]

Can you be more precise? Memory safety does not only affect C programs and - despite people repeating this over and over - I do not believe it is true that it is actually harder to build safe programs in C compared to many other languages. Ada and Rust have certainly some advantage, but I think also this is exaggerated.

[pjmlp]

Memory corruption caused by lack of bounds checking, or vocabulary types like the ones provided by SDS and glib.

Microsoft had to come up with SAL during Windows XP SP2, Apple with -fbounds-safety alongside Safe C dialect for iBoot firmware, Oracle with ADI on Solaris/SPARC, Apple's ARM PAC extension, ARM and Microsoft's collaboration on Pluton and CHERI Morello, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Samsung's collaboration on ARM's MTE.

Lots of money being spent on R&D, for something WG14 considers exaggerated.

[uecker]

Those extensions are mostly to be able to enhance safety of legacy code though and not necessary when writing new code that is safe. But it is only the later that is relevant when comparing to new alternative languages.

[pjmlp]

Where can we find examples of such newly written C code that is memory safe, given that language features that would make it possible are only now under discussion for future standards, after governments and industry pressure?

[pjmlp]

Maybe people should take advantage D, Ada and Modula-2 are all part of GCC.