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While I agree with this, I look around the history of programming and see that too much code was written in C, and too much is being written in C++. And writin

While I agree with this, I look around the history of programming and see that too much code was written in C, and too much is being written in C++. And writing even more of it is my day job. One thing that slows down change is that new languages come with parallel universes called "runtimes". The D language (https://dlang.org/ https://dlang.org/) is an honourable exception (it has a runtime, but not a parellel universe). But D is only an incremental improvement on C++, and somehow never took off. Maybe Rust will be the Saviour.

ktRolster 10y ago
The advantage (one advantage?) of C is that if you write a library in C, then it can be used on any platform, and from any language. Basically every language has bindings into C.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Every language has OS ABI bindings, that on OS written in C, tend to be the same as the OS ABI.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    http://www.swig.org/ http://www.swig.org/
p0nce 10y ago
Video codecs are incremental improvements upon incremental improvements. That doesn't prevent each new generation to beat the previous by 2x.
pjmlp 10y ago
Many times is a mixture of culture and people not knowing better. Runtimes are a wonderful thing, they abstract the OS and make it almost irrelevant. Actually, I see POSIX as the unofficial C runtime that for political reasons wasn't made into ANSI C and turning into a separate standard instead. I stop caring about POSIX, when I left the C++ world as full stack behind and started using it only to optimize specific code paths or OS integration. Personally I think it is a side effect of the world going all VM/JIT, when the same languages could easily be AOT compiled to native code. So many developers just kept using C and C++, because they thought they were the only ones giving them compiler toolchains to do AOT. Lucky we now have Go, D, Swift, .NET Native, OCaml, Haskell, Ada, Rust to change that mentality.

ktRolster 10y ago

The advantage (one advantage?) of C is that if you write a library in C, then it can be used on any platform, and from any language. Basically every language has bindings into C.

pjmlp 10y ago
Every language has OS ABI bindings, that on OS written in C, tend to be the same as the OS ABI.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  http://www.swig.org/ http://www.swig.org/

p0nce 10y ago

Video codecs are incremental improvements upon incremental improvements. That doesn't prevent each new generation to beat the previous by 2x.

pjmlp 10y ago

Many times is a mixture of culture and people not knowing better. Runtimes are a wonderful thing, they abstract the OS and make it almost irrelevant. Actually, I see POSIX as the unofficial C runtime that for political reasons wasn't made into ANSI C and turning into a separate standard instead. I stop caring about POSIX, when I left the C++ world as full stack behind and started using it only to optimize specific code paths or OS integration. Personally I think it is a side effect of the world going all VM/JIT, when the same languages could easily be AOT compiled to native code. So many developers just kept using C and C++, because they thought they were the only ones giving them compiler toolchains to do AOT. Lucky we now have Go, D, Swift, .NET Native, OCaml, Haskell, Ada, Rust to change that mentality.