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Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

UNIX/POSIX clones and embedded still demand C for most workloads, so that is going to be quite hard to ever change.

There is some hope for embedded, when enough developers are gone, however for UNIX/POSIX it is impossible given the symbiotic nature of both, only when we get rid of UNIX clones.

Thanks. I was genuinely curious. I’m surprised embedded still overwhelmingly demands C, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of inertia which you alluded to.

Mostly due to culture, there are hardly any chips without C++ compilers, and plenty of them have Basic and Pascal compilers available as well.

This is something that can only be changed with new blood bringing a more open mindset.

C++ has all the problems that come with C plus all of its own problems. Also, OOP is pointless.

C++ != OOP, while C++ cannot fix flaws inherited from C, at least it can provide types with bounds checking, and data types with type driven invariants, something that C will never provide.

Embedded systems

Only obsolete versions of GCC are available for many old chips, so they are limited to C. Otherwise, it better to use Rust in new projects. Rust can do almost everything C can do in less lines of code, sometimes even faster and with smaller memory. Moreover, it's possible to write firmware, kernel, network server, web or desktop application in Rust, so single language can be used in broad number of cases.

We are a successfull hardware startup and our line of products are built around TI F28004x series MCUs. Even if we wanted to use Rust, none of our chips are in any of Rust's supported platform tiers. That's a nonstarter.

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