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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

You do understand that zig started out by removing things from C and then "adding rich constexprs" and that's it? It's arguably simpler than C, C is actually two languages (C and C preprocessor), three if you add make, five if you add cmake and autoconf.

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What's the motivation for changing the visually appealing C syntax "ptr->field" to the whack "ptr.*.field"?

ptr.field works.

make, cmake and autoconf are not not part of the C language, they are build tools.

In practice you can't be productive in a large project in C without make, increasingly cmake (at the very least for reading someone else's c project). And it's part of the zig agenda to unify build tools, too. We are now in the 2nd decade of the 21st century, it is not strange for programming languages to be opinionated about build tools, ruby has rake, rust has cargo, js has, well, js is a mess, don't copy js, elixir has mix, etc (and those are just the languages I know).

That doesn’t make those tools part of the C standard, though. The standard does not mandate the use of any particular build tool for C projects beyond a conformant C compiler. There is nothing stopping me from using meson, ninja, bazel, a Frankenstein shell script, etc. to build a C project. Hell, there is nothing stopping me from using make to build non-C projects - it was designed as a generic dependency resolution tool.

> There is nothing stopping me from using meson, ninja, bazel, a Frankenstein shell script, etc. to build a C project

There is if you intend to use libraries as those libraries may well have chosen a build system other than the one you have chosen meaning you'd have to rewrite their build scripts. This is far from the experience of using libraries in languages with unified build systems which is typically as simple as adding a line with the version of the library you want to a manifest file.

> That doesn’t make those tools part of the C standard, though

So? I'm talking about the C experience, not the C standard.

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