4 ms·

None of the alternatives have stability. What was exemplary & idiomatic rust pre-pandemic would be churlish & rejected now and the toolchain use would be differ

None of the alternatives have stability. What was exemplary & idiomatic rust pre-pandemic would be churlish & rejected now and the toolchain use would be different anyway. Carpenters, plumbers, masons & electricians work on houses 3-300 yrs old, navigate the range of legacy styles & tech they encounter, and predictably get good outcomes. Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. C99, baby, why pay more? When there’s an alternative that can compete with that sort of real-world durability, C will get displaced.

charleslmunger 9mo ago
C99, but with a million macros backporting features from newer language versions and compiler extensions. Lovely features you don't get with ordinary c99: free_sized #embed static_assert Types for enum Alignof, alignas, aligned_alloc _Atomic
okanat 9mo ago
The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are: - People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or applications in higher level programming languages. - C hit a perfect balance of being a small enough language to grok, being indepedent of the system manufacturers, reflecting the computer architecture of 80s, actually small in syntax and code length and quite easy to implement compilers for. This caused lots of legacy software being built into the infrastructure that gave birth to the current contemporary popular OSes and more importantly the infrastructure of the Internet. Add in .com bubbles and other crises, we basically have/had zero economic incentive to replace those systems. - Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well. It doesn't mean that people haven't tried or even succeeded. Android was successful in multiple fronts in replacing C. Its "intents" and low level interface description language for hardware interfaces are great replacement for C ABI. Windows' COM is also a good replacement that gets rid of language dependence. There are still newer OSes try like Redox or Fuchsia.
- kogasa240p 9mo ago
  >Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well. IMO I do see this changing in the future as higher power computers become expensive once again, and I'm not just referring to the recent chip shortage.
- trueismywork 9mo ago
  Name me a stable binary interface that is not ints and arrays of ints
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    COM, WinRT, XPC, AIDL. Now you can move the goal posts and assert that any data serialized into a memory buffer is an array of ints.
  - okanat 9mo ago
    C ABI is more than how ints and array of ints sit next to each other in memory. It cares about calling conventions and what you can store in registers vs what you cannot. There are multiple possible ways of doing an RPC call and C ABI only provides one way of doing it.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
    How big is an int?
- noosphr 9mo ago
  I'd never thought I'd see the day that anyone praises COM.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    As idea it is great, as the tooling available in C++ Builder, Delphi, VB 6, C++/CX (WinRT is basically COM with extras) also great. Using it from MFC, kind of alright. Using it from .NET, depends if Framework, .NET Native, or modern, with various levels of usability. Using it from ATL, WRL, C++/WinRT, is a mess unfortunely.
cannonpr 9mo ago
Having just finished renovating a 140-year-old home with solid brick walls that was slowly collapsing and deteriorating due to the aforementioned professionals’ application of modern and chemically incompatible materials to it… I’m not sure I agree. It’s also why a lot of the UK’s building stock is slowly rotting with black mould right now. Literally none of the professionals I hired, before I trained them, knew how to properly repair a type of home that represents 30% of the UK building stock.
- yeame 9mo ago
  [flagged]
ux266478 9mo ago
> Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. On the contrary, Lisp outshines C to a large degree here. Success has nothing to do with technical merit (if such a thing even exists), it's not a rational game.
- Panzer04 9mo ago
  What makes you say that?
  - ux266478 9mo ago
    Reduce is a Lisp library that's still in active use from 1968, making it older than C itself. We can point to GNU Emacs as an ancient and venerable self-contained Lisp tortoise with more wrinkles than are finitely enumerable, and is in fact a hosted Lisp operating system. Pulling it apart and working with it is admittedly a treat even if I loathe it as a text editor. Mezzano is a modern Lisp OS that you can play with in a VM, and might give you an idea of why Lisp is such a great systems language. In short: Lisp is semantic and geared towards a living system. The basic REPL is sh + cc + ld + db (and a few others) all in one. It's almost a little mind bending how nice these systems are put together, how cleanly they work. C is like pulling teeth in comparison. I'm not even a fan of Lisp or sexpr languages. But it's the obvious heavyweight champion of longetivity and ultra-pragmatic service record... Yes, even in the systems domain.
    - jklowden 9mo ago
      Not sure how viable Mezzano is. The most recent bug report was two years ago. The “beginnings of a manual” was last updated 7 years ago. A better example might be Guix, depending how “operating system” is defined.
      - ux266478 9mo ago
        Both of which are besides viability. It's just a usable system that gets you an idea of how an OS works when it's Lisp all the way down. It didn't invent this idea, it's just a modern example of it.
thayne 9mo ago
FWIW, the crabi project within rust is trying to improve on some parts of it. But it is still built on (a subset of) the environments c ABI. And it doesn't fix all the problems.
pjmlp 9mo ago
Outside UNIX clones, and embedded space where it is mostly a religious point of view than available compiler toolchains, C has already been displaced. Even the most relevant C compilers are no longer written in C.
- kreco 9mo ago
  > Even the most relevant C compilers are no longer written in C. Worth to point out that most of the C compilers are also C++ compilers. So the point is kind of distorted.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    On the contrary, GNU Compiler Collection is written in C++ and happens to have C as one of the supported fronteds, having moved away from C in 2008. LLVM is written in C++, also supports multiple language frontends, one of them happens to be C. Visual C++, also written in C++, happens to still compile some form of C, and after adding some C11 and C17 support (a few items are still missing in 2026), Microsoft is in no rush to add anything else. The language that matters is the implementation, otherwise we can also talk about the relevance of PL/I compilers from IBM and Unisys, written in C++.
- mbonnet 9mo ago
  Rust is making huge headway in mission-critical embedded.
NuclearPM 9mo ago
Churlish can’t be the right word here.

charleslmunger 9mo ago

C99, but with a million macros backporting features from newer language versions and compiler extensions. Lovely features you don't get with ordinary c99: free_sized #embed static_assert Types for enum Alignof, alignas, aligned_alloc _Atomic

okanat 9mo ago

The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are: - People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or applications in higher level programming languages. - C hit a perfect balance of being a small enough language to grok, being indepedent of the system manufacturers, reflecting the computer architecture of 80s, actually small in syntax and code length and quite easy to implement compilers for. This caused lots of legacy software being built into the infrastructure that gave birth to the current contemporary popular OSes and more importantly the infrastructure of the Internet. Add in .com bubbles and other crises, we basically have/had zero economic incentive to replace those systems. - Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well. It doesn't mean that people haven't tried or even succeeded. Android was successful in multiple fronts in replacing C. Its "intents" and low level interface description language for hardware interfaces are great replacement for C ABI. Windows' COM is also a good replacement that gets rid of language dependence. There are still newer OSes try like Redox or Fuchsia.

kogasa240p 9mo ago
>Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well. IMO I do see this changing in the future as higher power computers become expensive once again, and I'm not just referring to the recent chip shortage.
trueismywork 9mo ago
Name me a stable binary interface that is not ints and arrays of ints
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  COM, WinRT, XPC, AIDL. Now you can move the goal posts and assert that any data serialized into a memory buffer is an array of ints.
- okanat 9mo ago
  C ABI is more than how ints and array of ints sit next to each other in memory. It cares about calling conventions and what you can store in registers vs what you cannot. There are multiple possible ways of doing an RPC call and C ABI only provides one way of doing it.
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
  How big is an int?
noosphr 9mo ago
I'd never thought I'd see the day that anyone praises COM.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  As idea it is great, as the tooling available in C++ Builder, Delphi, VB 6, C++/CX (WinRT is basically COM with extras) also great. Using it from MFC, kind of alright. Using it from .NET, depends if Framework, .NET Native, or modern, with various levels of usability. Using it from ATL, WRL, C++/WinRT, is a mess unfortunely.

cannonpr 9mo ago

Having just finished renovating a 140-year-old home with solid brick walls that was slowly collapsing and deteriorating due to the aforementioned professionals’ application of modern and chemically incompatible materials to it… I’m not sure I agree. It’s also why a lot of the UK’s building stock is slowly rotting with black mould right now. Literally none of the professionals I hired, before I trained them, knew how to properly repair a type of home that represents 30% of the UK building stock.

yeame 9mo ago
[flagged]

ux266478 9mo ago

> Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. On the contrary, Lisp outshines C to a large degree here. Success has nothing to do with technical merit (if such a thing even exists), it's not a rational game.

Panzer04 9mo ago
What makes you say that?
- ux266478 9mo ago
  Reduce is a Lisp library that's still in active use from 1968, making it older than C itself. We can point to GNU Emacs as an ancient and venerable self-contained Lisp tortoise with more wrinkles than are finitely enumerable, and is in fact a hosted Lisp operating system. Pulling it apart and working with it is admittedly a treat even if I loathe it as a text editor. Mezzano is a modern Lisp OS that you can play with in a VM, and might give you an idea of why Lisp is such a great systems language. In short: Lisp is semantic and geared towards a living system. The basic REPL is sh + cc + ld + db (and a few others) all in one. It's almost a little mind bending how nice these systems are put together, how cleanly they work. C is like pulling teeth in comparison. I'm not even a fan of Lisp or sexpr languages. But it's the obvious heavyweight champion of longetivity and ultra-pragmatic service record... Yes, even in the systems domain.
  - jklowden 9mo ago
    Not sure how viable Mezzano is. The most recent bug report was two years ago. The “beginnings of a manual” was last updated 7 years ago. A better example might be Guix, depending how “operating system” is defined.
    - ux266478 9mo ago
      Both of which are besides viability. It's just a usable system that gets you an idea of how an OS works when it's Lisp all the way down. It didn't invent this idea, it's just a modern example of it.

thayne 9mo ago

FWIW, the crabi project within rust is trying to improve on some parts of it. But it is still built on (a subset of) the environments c ABI. And it doesn't fix all the problems.

pjmlp 9mo ago

Outside UNIX clones, and embedded space where it is mostly a religious point of view than available compiler toolchains, C has already been displaced. Even the most relevant C compilers are no longer written in C.

kreco 9mo ago
> Even the most relevant C compilers are no longer written in C. Worth to point out that most of the C compilers are also C++ compilers. So the point is kind of distorted.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  On the contrary, GNU Compiler Collection is written in C++ and happens to have C as one of the supported fronteds, having moved away from C in 2008. LLVM is written in C++, also supports multiple language frontends, one of them happens to be C. Visual C++, also written in C++, happens to still compile some form of C, and after adding some C11 and C17 support (a few items are still missing in 2026), Microsoft is in no rush to add anything else. The language that matters is the implementation, otherwise we can also talk about the relevance of PL/I compilers from IBM and Unisys, written in C++.
mbonnet 9mo ago
Rust is making huge headway in mission-critical embedded.

NuclearPM 9mo ago

Churlish can’t be the right word here.