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phicohtoday at 11:42 AM1 replyview on HN

C uses pointer casts all over the place to fake generics. If you don't have that (in Pascal or MODULA-2) then life becomes very unpleasant.

There is a quite a bit of C code that makes creative use of the size of allocations. For example linked lists with a variable sized payload. Again one of the things that would prevent a C programmer from switching to Pascal.

I don't expect the Zig user base to become larger than the Rust user base any time soon. But we have to wait and see, Zig is quite young.


Replies

pjmlptoday at 1:00 PM

Same tricks are possible in Modula-2, Pascal, Ada, if fake generics count.

Creative use of the size of allocations are also possible in those languages, the BIG difference is that they aren't the default way everything gets done.