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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you could make a near-C++ that could really get traction. Literally compile to C++ (and then compile from there) and just fix a ton of cruft in the language including:

- Stealing C# attribute notation instead of having the ridiculous __stdcall sort of convention

- Making a real fucking keyword for pure virtual functions instead of = 0

- A real keyword for include guards

- Function pointer syntax sugar

I now realize I'm describing D but D went too far. I just want like three nice changes that still allow near unchanged compilation to C++.

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As others have said, it's not worth breaking away from the standard language only to make a few shallow changes. It needs to be a fairly radical improvement or it's just not worth it. If Kotlin were too similar to Java, it couldn't have offered much reason to adopt it.

If you want a modern language that compiles down to C (not C++), there's Vala. It even has some kind of async support now.

>- Stealing C# attribute notation instead of having the ridiculous __stdcall sort of convention

C++17 introduced the attributes in the form of [[attribute]], e.g. [[maybe_unused]], [[fallthrough]]. Clang also supports e.g. [[gnu::packed]] instead of __attribute__((packed)).

>- A real keyword for include guards

"#pragma once" is de facto supported everywhere. The general stance seems to have been to not bother with standardizing, as modules were a better solution anyway.

>- Function pointer syntax sugar

Aliasing function pointer seems mostly reasonable?

    using my_function_pointer = double(*)(int a, int b);

I think you overestimate how much traction such small modifications would get.

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