Checked C: Making C Safer by Extension

Something like vim has archaisms that are only mildly depended on, allowing a project like neovim to credibly call itself the future. But Python 2 still has a large install base of software that's still running it. Python 3 didn't offer a smooth enough upgrade path from Python 2, so we're seeing the slow bifurcation of the community into two language. This also happened with Rails 2, there is still large enough install base of Rails 2 software that there's a dedicated effort to support it, Rails LTS.

These bifurcations will last until gradual enough upgrade paths are made and failure modes are isolated enough so that moving a project off of old tech and onto new tech can be accomplished without business investment. It's merely another user story to be put in the pipeline. Old applications will slowly get either abandoned or migrated or reinvented over time.

This process fails when you consider underlying infrastructure, which by its nature largely has a much deeper base of software that depends on it. Applications can have many dependencies, but those dependencies tend to be well-enumerated, as not enumerating them leads to a maintainability nightmare for people unfamiliar with the system. And nothing but other business software depends on the application.

But infrastructure code's dependency structure is inverted. Many more applications depend on infrastructure and infrastructure tends to have comparatively fewer dependencies of its own. When infrastructure has lots of dependencies it makes it harder to scale, and scale is the whole point of infrastructure. This need for infrastructure to all 'hang together' so as to provide for scale is what's behind the modern concept of an operating system. Applications tend to rely first on the software stack, second on the operating system. It's much easier take a Rails application built to run on Ubuntu and migrate it so it can run on Red Hat or Docker than it is to get it to run on Sinatra, god forbid another general purpose programming language. In fact, it's so much easier that it's considered a major red flag for this to not be the case. Operating systems are more fungible than software stacks.

This process of bifurcation followed by slow abandonment of harder-to-maintain systems in favor of easier-to-maintain ones is just going to slowly reach its apotheosis when line of business software that is much of a career programmer's bread and butter is going to slowly lose all attachment to, not just the operating system, but also the software stack as well. FaaS, Function as a service, is something you can add to your application right now, and once you do that work once, it just gets easier and easier to offload portions of the application that simply glue things together or compute things, to a magical land where teams of elves do literally everything else for you for a small fee, is going to become mainstream sooner rather than later.