5 ms·

I think there is a gap in the market for small language which is just a "better C", but developing a new language is a great deal of work, and it would be hard

I think there is a gap in the market for small language which is just a "better C", but developing a new language is a great deal of work, and it would be hard to compete against the alternative of using a small subset of {Ada, Rust, whatever}. Maybe the large languages should look at defining official subsets, to make life simpler both for programmers and validation. Ada used to have something of the sort (and still does for all I know).

chessturk 8y ago
I'm curious if you consider Nim or Golang to be a small language that is a "better C". If not, why?
- mjw1007 8y ago
  I don't think they count as a "better C" for this purpose. I'm thinking of something aiming at the niche that C currently fills. Having a garbage collector doesn't fit that, and Nim doesn't look small (anything with both destructors and exceptions is getting into complications rather beyond C).
  - chessturk 8y ago
    Makes sense to me, thanks for answering.
  - nimmer 8y ago
    Regardless, I use Nim when I need the performance and memory footprint of C. GC is optional.
    - mjw1007 8y ago
      Right, that's exactly the « it would be hard to compete against the alternative of using a small subset of {whatever} » case.
    - jefftime 8y ago
      Can you use the standard library without GC?
      - nimmer 8y ago
        Most of it.
igouy 8y ago
> Ada used to have something of the sort (and still does for all I know). https://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/ug/en/tutorial.html#spark-tutorial https://docs.adacore.com/spark2014-docs/html/ug/en/tutorial....