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lelanthran

> Not to shit on decent work, but I don't see a reason to use this over Zig.

Maybe you don't mean to sound harsh but from their About page:

" It is an evolution of C enabling the same paradigms and retaining the same syntax as far as possible."

I don't think Zig has the same goal.

Also, they usefully compare the languages:

"In Zig but not in C3

    Pervasive compile time execution.
    Memory allocation failure is an error.
    Zig's compile time execution is the build system.
    Different syntax and behaviour compared to C.
    Structs define namespace.
    Async primitives built in.

In C3 but not in Zig

    Module system
    Integrated build system
    Built-in strings, maps, vararrays
    Optional contracts
    Familiar C syntax and behaviour
"

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> I don't think Zig has the same goal.

It seems to me that the only meaningful difference in their goals, is that C3 wants to stay as close to C as possible, including having familiar syntax.

> Also, they usefully compare the languages [...]

The comparison seems disingenuous.

Zig has a module system where each zig file is a module and it has a mechanism to specify public parts of the module.

One of the standout features of zig is the integrated build system, which uses a reliable caching mechanism to allow incremental builds without rebuilding the world. It's somewhat remniscient of bazel actually.

The zig std library features hashmaps and variable length arrays. Strings are not different from slices of u8. It's unclear to me what C3 means by "built-in strings". The only reference I could find was under "crazy ideas", where they vaguely refer to needing to figure out memory management. That seems like a pretty big outstanding issue for a C competitor.

So the unique feature of C3 appears to be the contracts system of pre- and postconditions, which are only used as language hints to the compiler.

> Zig has a module system where each zig file is a module and it has a mechanism to specify public parts of the module.

"Module system" has many meanings. In functional languages, it has much more flexible semantics than just namespacing and data hiding declarations, so perhaps C3 means it has this sort of module system.

A "module system" should be something beyond a name spacing scheme. So that's the difference.

Re: strings I had a stronger idea of that initially but I wasn't sure, so I kept postponing it, and due to features I added later it's now possible to make strings in userland... probably. I still need to think about this a lot.

But I agree that I should revisit this comparison to make it more up to date. For example an important difference would be that Zig adds quite a bit of UB on top of C, whereas C3 removes UB compared to C.

There are minor things Zig doesn't have like: substructs (I think!), trailing macros (allowing easy "scoping" macros, limited operator overloading (allowing for example userland lists use foreach), type methods are possible to extend by other modules. Then the whole way to do generic types and functions are different, with Zig building it on top of parameterized structs, whereas C3 uses parameterized modules, which creates a bit of difference.

A lot of that latter list seems to actually be in Zig though?

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