alt Hacker NewsI love Rust, but I miss C. If C can be updated to make it generally socially acceptable for new projects, I'd happily go back for some decent subset of things I do. However, there's a lot of anxiety and even angst around using C in production code.
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Feels like Zig is starting to fill that role in some ways. Fewer sharp edges and a bit more safety than C, more modern approach, and even interops really well with C (even being possible to mix the two). Know a couple Rust devs that have said it seems to scratch that C itch while being more modern.
Of course it's still really nice to just have C itself being updated into something that's nicer to work with and easier to write safely, but Zig seems to be a decent other option.
If you can stomach the occasional Begin and End, and a far less confusing pointer syntax, Pascal might be the language for you. Free Pascal has some great string handling, so you never have to worry about allocating and freeing them, and they can store gigabytes of text, even Unicode. ;-)
Fil-C is a modified version of Clang that makes C and C++ memory safe. It supports things you wouldn't expect to work like signal handling or setjmp/longjmp. It can compile real C projects like SQLite and OpenSSL with minimal to no changes, today. https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge/blob/delug...
Do you really love Rust, or do you feel pressured to say so?
> to make it generally socially acceptable for new projects...
Or better yet, don't let 'social pressure' influence your choice of programming language ;)
If your workplace has a clear rule to not use memory-unsafe languages for production code that's a different matter of course. But nothing can stop you from writing C code as a hobby - C99 and later is a very enjoyable and fun language.