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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

The more I learn about new and less new languages (Zig, Jai, C#) the more I like C and its true simplicity.

The language has a few irritating historical artefacts and the stdlib API is completely outdated and full of bad design, but there it is still versatile enough for my needs.

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> the stdlib API is completely outdated and full of bad design

It is also completely unnecessary on Linux. I switched to freestanding C and discovered it was a much better language. Made programming fun again. All I needed was one system call function and some entry point code.

It's gotten to the point that it bothers me that gcc could potentially generate calls to mem* functions even in freestanding mode.

llvm does that too. It's really tempting to assume there's a libc available for the target architecture. On the list of things to clean up that hasn't hit top of stack for anyone.

The simplicity is a blessing and curse. I enjoy writing C and sticking to a hard discipline of writing unit tests for all functions where possible. Abusing `assert/1` in debug mode. But concurrency is a hard thing to build. Identifying critical sections, making sure they have mutex locks where necessary. I want to love Rust but it's hard for me to get used to the syntax. I've started using it and failed multiple times because it's terse. Inevitably I will try again and hope it pans out.

I like C89 for its simplicity too but after using the Jai beta for over a year I have a hard time seeing myself ever going back.

I'll probably give Jai a go when it is released, but I am a bit afraid the idiosyncrasies are already creeping up.

any particular examples?

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