The problem with C isn't that it's old, unsafe, conservative, or that it lacks GC. The problem is that people have religious wars about strncat vs strlcat, whic

The problem with C isn't that it's old, unsafe, conservative, or that it lacks GC. The problem is that people have religious wars about strncat vs strlcat, which are both terrible and both equally broken, rather than looking at the big picture. The big picture is that there are hardly any functions in the standard library that aren't terrible. If you wanted a safe, fast printf function in C for example, one way to do it would be to provide a function that took a format string and returned a reusable handle, much like you use regular expressions in a library like PCRE. This would give you instant benefits when it came to print and scan loops (no re-parsing of the format string), while still giving the compiler ample opportunity to do type checking without too much work. It even opens the door to a JIT and/or AOT backend, all without major changes to the actual compiler. void (*hello)(char const*, int); if (!printf_jit ("Hello %s, you have %d points\n", &hello)) { /* jit failed */ } hello ("Steve", 80); printf_free (hello); I don't lump C++ in the same boat. The above code can be written semantically in C++ today, without any external libraries, with full type-checking.