[rcxdude]

to be fair, most programmers are at least a little bit polyglot, and if you know python and C and you're trying to solve an interview problem, python is gonna be the easier option 99% of the time, even if you're not that great at python compared to C.

[josephg]

> python is gonna be the easier option 99% of the time

If python/go/C# is easier to write, why choose C? Fil-C removes C’s performance and interoperability advantages.

[rcxdude]

Python is easier to write for interview questions. It generally doesn't scale well (in terms of size of team and codebase).

TBH C# is probably a good default for a lot of projects, from a safety and performance standpoint (rust's big performance win over GC/JIT languages is more in the memory consumption than throughput, counterintuitively). Fil-C probably still has a pretty good edge on python's performance, though.

[josephg]

> Fil-C probably still has a pretty good edge on python's performance, though.

Probably - but where are the benchmarks?

> Python […] generally doesn't scale well (in terms of size of team and codebase).

I’d argue neither does C. Everyone works around C’s lack of generics in their own way, so every large project becomes its own little world.

C’s biggest scalability problem is its lack of clear ownership semantics in APIs. If I call a function in your module which takes a Foo*, am I passing ownership? (So you’re responsible for freeing the object)? Do I need to retain the object while you use it? How long? Can I free the Foo when the function call returns? Or do you hold onto that reference until much later? Am I free to keep interacting with the Foo while you hold a reference? Can I do that from a separate thread, or is that unsafe? Every time I call a function in a medium to large C project (or in a library), I need to answer all these questions. Documentation is often unclear and the language doesn’t help at all. Mistakes lead to crashes, corruption and CVEs.

Real GC languages (Java, C#, JS, etc) solve this problem by just letting me write my code however I want. The object is freed when no more references are held. So I don’t even have to think about it. The cost is worse performance at runtime. Rust solves this with lifetimes and static analysis. You pay with complexity and slow compilation. But programs are fast and correct.

C - and by extension Fil-C - makes me solve this problem by hand. But you also pay a runtime performance cost to use a GC. This seems like the worst of all worlds.

Obviously people still write large programs in C. But I’d argue they manage that through grit and skill, in spite of C’s weak ownership semantics. Not because of it.