I've only somewhat recently become a hardcore C programmer, but I actually quite like it. Wrote my own incremental generational garbage collector recently—the t

I've only somewhat recently become a hardcore C programmer, but I actually quite like it. Wrote my own incremental generational garbage collector recently—the things you can do in C are fun. Here are some things I'd really like: Not language, rather standard library, but I would like to see a new allocation API with explicit control over alignment, separation of reserving and committing addresses, and generally updated for the fact that memory systems are different now than they were in 1979. aligned_alloc is alright, except there's no aligned_realloc. Linux always reserves addresses and doesn't commit until it needs to, but that can't be relied on for portable code. In short: we're in a 64-bit, virtual memory world. I don't want an allocator design from 1979. It's about time glibc's custom streams[1] get standardized. Real talk, it's 2016 and we can't define custom FILE * types. This doesn't even need to expose the libc's FILE implementation; it can remain opaque just fine. Language-wise, I'd like to see a pragma to covert an array of structs to a struct of arrays; i.e. declare #pragma struct SOA struct entity { uint32_t id; ... }; struct entity all_entities[1000]; and have the compiler rewrite it to struct { uint32_t id[1000]; ...[1000]; } all_entities; // where typeof(all_entites[N]) == typeof(struct entity) à la Jai[2]. This isn't a particularly hard transformation to do by hand, but it's kind of tedious. Standardizing M4 as a preprocessor would be a nice-to-have; i.e. you should be able to compile a .h.m4 or .c.m4 file directly. I don't know why GCC can't do this yet. It's a bit of a niche thing, but some of us are M4 addicts. C is in a pretty good place otherwise. I like to think there are 3 known local optima in terms of programming languages: C, Lisp, and Forth. All of them are a little hard at first, but quickly become very easy to think in. We'll probably never get any of this, which is a little depressing. I get the feeling the C committee doesn't really care that much about evolving the language any more. Modern, fast, safe(-ish), readable code is a GCC extension. 1. http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Custom-Streams.html#Custom-Streams http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Custom-Str... 2. https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md#data-oriented-structures https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md...