alt Hacker NewsI've been following C3 for sometime now, and I really appreciate the discipline in the design philosophy here.
Neither does it force a new memory model on you, nor does it try to be C++. The killer feature for me is the full ABI compatibility. The fact that I no longer have to write bindings and can just mix C3 files into my existing C build system reduces the friction to near zero.
Kudos to the maintainer for sticking to the evolution, not revolution vision. If you are looking for a weekend language to learn that doesn't require resetting your brain but feels more modern than C99, I highly recommend giving this a shot. Great work by the team.
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Is full ABI compatibility important? I'm having a hard time seeing why.
I mean… C isn't even an unsafe language. It's just that C implementations and ABIs are unsafe. Some fat pointers, less insanely unsafe varargs implementations, UBSan on by default, MTE… soon you're doing pretty well! (Exceptions apply.)
But can I still write a library in C3 and export the symbols to use in bindings?
The only thing stopping me from just going full C the rest of my career is cstrings and dangling pointers to raw memory that isn’t cleaned up when the process ends.