alt Hacker NewsAs some respectable C developer I know says: the issue with the C "killers" is that the people that already know C, have years, decades and experiences they are unwilling to let go. They can jump across any major systems programming project out there and feel at home.
So to win these people you need to have a killer feature that can win them, Rust offers it. The Jai, C3, Zig, etc, do not.
Sure, they are better Cs, but that's not enough to switch.
So eventually, all those C killers will keep growing, among newer system programmers, but not much among seasoned C devs.
> Sure, they are better Cs, but that's not enough to switch.
It's also not always clear they are "better". The Handmade Community, from which this essay and several of these "better C" languages ultimately spring has some weird ideas about what constitutes "better".
Handmade is Casey Muratori's thing. If you understand it as "This one guy did a video essay series and it all got a bit out of hand" it makes more sense. A twenty first century "Life of Brian" but for software engineering. He's not the Messiah, he's just some guy who was asked his opinion.
They're certainly different which is a key requirement to be better that is often not met by "audiophile" technologies, so that's something. Several of them have some Spatial Memory Safety features (ie bounds checking), which is a thing C doesn't provide out of the box for example [but see Fil-C].
I spent decades writing C for money and for pleasure, and I don't write C any more, I write Rust. But then I was never Casey's audience. For one thing of course, by the time "Handmade Hero" was published I was a long way into my career as a programmer, so it's not really "for" me even if I wanted to make video games (I do not want to make video games).