[simias]

That's a good lessons for people wanting to create a new languages too. One of the reasons C++ was successful in the first place is that it needs almost no glue to interface with C code. Contrast that with all the languages providing a more or less cumbersome FFI.

Rust for instance looks very promising but you still have to go through the tedious task of redeclaring all the prototypes of the C functions before you call them, it cannot directly parse C headers (as far as I know). That makes writing hybrid code (for instance incrementally porting code from C into Rust) much more difficult and error prone than they need to be.

[kibwen]

Actually, one of the first tools to appear in the Rust ecosystem was a port of the "bindgen" program written for the Clay language, which has been solving the problem of parsing C headers for years now:

https://github.com/crabtw/rust-bindgen/

There are also long-term plans for adopting this into the compiler itself:

https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/2124

[simias]

Ah, thank you, I knew I saw something like that when I looked into rust a while back, but there was no mention of it in the Rust FFI guide[1]. It should definitely be included in the compiler at some point, it's a vital feature IMO.

[1] http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/guide-ffi.html

[pjmlp]

Another one is that all successful system programming languages have a OS vendor shipping them on their OS SDK.

That is the only way to make people adopt them. Otherwise they become just another language to do business applications.