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Despite all of its limitations, C still has no viable alternatives in many areas. And personally I now really appreciate the persistence of C in contrast to al

• ncmncm 7y ago
  There is literally no place where C has no viable alternative.
  • coldtea 7y ago
    If you take account quality and maturity of compilers, number of alternative implementations, support, quality of tooling, availability of architectures, number of practicing programmers, libs, existing interfaces and OSes supporting it, and so on, there are tons of places...
    • ncmncm 7y ago
      There are many languages that can be transcribed to C. So, if you have C, you have every other such language, only a makefile entry away. Furthermore most environments that seem to have only C are a Gcc target, and then you have access to all the other languages Gcc can compile, without a detour to C.
      • clktmr 7y ago
        Even if it's possible, the change is not worth it. Transcribing leads to a horrible debug experience. Immature languages maintained by a single/few are a no-go. Your team already knows C and is good at it, finding new programmers is easy. You don't want another language, even if it's supported by GCC. If you want anything from C, then it's more safety guarantees. And C is flexible enough to run a better type system on top of it, e.g. look at what the kernel community is doing with `sparse`.
        • ncmncm 7y ago
          If you want to use C, use C. But to insist there is no alternative is just untrue, and (after you have been corrected) dishonest.
          • clktmr 7y ago
            We were talking about viable alternatives.
            • ncmncm 7y ago
              As I said.
  • 0xdead 7y ago
    I can say that for every language on earth. C is the best of the alternatives in a lot of areas. And yes, C++ is almost always a bad alternative to C.