alt Hacker NewsAs someone who loves and enjoys writing Plan 9 c, all I can say is "standard c", whatever that means these days, is a mess. Too many things to name ranging from the only two oss compilers being bloated monsters, post c99 additions being pointless, in-line asm ruining portability*, and POSIX can die in a fire (along with typewriter terminals.)
I have a friend who is currently on the C committee and is likely going to leave because of all the bad ideas which have both been implemented and going to be implemented.
* No, spamming a million ugly #ifdefs all over the source files is gross and hard to read. Split up the code dammit.
Replies
As much as I’m sentimental about C/C++ myself, changing language spec every 3 years is not what I call standards
Plan 9 inheritance is really nice. You can still use it with `gcc -fplan9-extensions`. It builds some nice polymorphic workflow an array of tagged enum void pointers
>post c99 additions being pointless
Atomics are necessary nowadays though.
There's a lot of post-C99 that has somewhat questionable value (_Generic is very much a we-have-templates-at-home kind of feature), but there are some post-C99 features that I'm rather happy to have:
* thread_local and _Atomic support from C11
* fopen("foo", "x") from C11
* aligned_alloc from C11
* CMPLX macro from C11
* C++ attribute syntax ([[foo]] flows better to me than __attribute__((foo)) does)
* C23 finally gets rid of _Who _The _Hell _Thinks _Users _Like _This-style _Keywords.
* Multi-level break/continue in C2y
* Variable declarations in if conditions.
* Some of the new operations like ckd_add or stdc_rotate_left. I do dislike the names, but meh, at least C is starting to gain a competent set of fundamental operations.
It would be nice for the C Standard to say that `char` is unsigned. The damage done by making its signedness implementation-defined is incalculable.
(D sez `char` is unsigned. No more nonsense!)
C also needs to implement proper arrays. D does it, and that one feature is worth its weight in gold:
https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html
It's sooo nice to not have array overflows anymore.