Love these responses.
There should be a language about as simple as c, with a few additional keywords for safety (type and memory), and a modern standard library -- that works basically everywhere C works, and is backwards compatible with C.
ie., we're missing --C++
I think all the supposed successors have approached the problem from the lang-design pov, where for C, it needs to be from-existing-compilers-and-tools pov.
I suspect there's a route to C v2 by starting with the C std, and gcc/clang, then working "forwards". Similar to cppfront for C++.
ie., it needs to compile 99% of all existing C code, it needs to compile to 90% of all in-use platform for C, etc.
i do think the successor should be src-compt with C
C but with better safety and additional developer ergonomics would be amazing.
Part of the problem is I think you would need to depart from the traditional C build system to get the most benefits. That will be hard for adoption.
I just recently started to dip my feet into golang and it feels like Go could've been something like that. With it's runtime and garbage collection that obviously disqualifies itself, but it's a really simple and fun language, I think. Something like that as a systems programming language with """easy""" memory management would be tremendous (maybe Zig is like that, but I haven't tried that out yet).
I don’t think backward C compatibility is a good idea, since the C syntax has issues. Instead a transpilation tool from C could be built.
Does C++ / Java / Python really represent the high water mark of programming languages? I sure hope not…
FWIW, I actually think syntax is sometimes the hard part about programming, especially when not working with a language frequently. I never worked much with C++, but occasionally come across it. Whenever this happens, it feels like things could be more readable, but maybe I'm biased.
