alt Hacker NewsI like the idea of strict improvements to C without taking anything away or making any controversial (as far as language design goes) choices.
One thing I am wondering is why new low level languages remove goto (Zig, C3, Nim). I think it's sometimes the cleanest, most readable and most maintainable solution. I get that's rare but especially when you are expressing low level algorithm operating on arrays/blocks/bit streams it can be useful. It's not that you can't express it with "structured" constructs but sometimes it's just not the best way. I get removing backwards goto when you provide alternative constructs for state machines but forward one is useful in other contexts.
Is it a purely ideological choice or does it make the compiler simpler/faster?
In C3 it's complicated. On one hand the lack of goto means defers are more straightforward, but the biggest problem is that once you have a different way to handle cleanup and you have labelled break/continue, and you have the nextcase to jump to arbitrary cases, there's very little left for goto to do.
It is limited to when you want to jump from within an if statement out across some statements and run the remaining code. It saves one level of indentation, but being so rare, it's hard to justify the complexity.
I keep going back and see if I find some usecase that could motivate putting goto back in but it so far nothing. The "nextcase" allows C3 to express arbitrary jumps back and forth, although not as straightforward as goto.