- Destructors are very useful indeed. So is automatic reference counting: both drastically decrease the annoyance of certain styles of coding. - Re: 'mechanic

- Destructors are very useful indeed. So is automatic reference counting: both drastically decrease the annoyance of certain styles of coding. - Re: 'mechanical sympathy', encouraging raw pointer access and such is nice until you start caring about security, at which point the few extra instructions required to bounds check vector accesses are infinitely less problematic than the alternative; in C++ you can stick them in vector::operator[], not in C. - C makes it extremely difficult to write efficient container types, due to the lack of templates. It's possible using macros, and I've done it, but the contortions and pitfalls inherent in the implementation of such macros eliminate any kind of aesthetic benefit. This encourages things like the use of raw {pointer, size} pairs over specialized types, which requires obnoxious boilerplate, and dumber data structures rather than smarter (e.g. linked list vs. hash table, when the number of entries is expected to be small - until suddenly it isn't). - On a related note, templates in general, when used right, make it easy to generate highly efficient specialized code, useful not just for containers but in many situations. It's a blemish to C's reputation for speed that it has more difficulty doing that. - Both languages lack proper sum types, which are a natural counterpart to structs; unions are nice but explicitly tagging them is entirely gratuitous unsafety. - Sometimes you really just want short code, and not to have to cross every i and dot every t. UI frameworks are a particularly good example, where there are a large number of knobs to turn, and many more that should be left at their defaults, making it very desirable to (a) minimize the length of code required to turn one and (b) make it as easy as possible to leave things unspecified - encouraging the free use of default parameters and overloads, and making the repetition involved in global name uniqueness look pretty ugly. I think this paradigm can be improved upon in general, but I'm not sure C is the language to do so in. Still, I don't think C++ is the future either, not even the improved-but-further-bloated newer versions. Nor do any of the other languages in the market do a good job at targeting the niche C currently excels at (including Rust).