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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

Oh, enough to improve things several times (to answer, 5 decades). People did some improvements, but clearly didn't keep-up with the times (and degraded some things too, UB being the elephant in the room).

But large things almost never keep-up with the times.

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Something else must be playing here and I'm pretty sure most of the annoyences did not get solved, mostly because of backward compatability guarantees. It is really a pitty that c/c++ did not get pushed away by competing languages that do/did not have so much of a legacy of sub-par development tooling. Friendlier and better designed languages like C#, Rust or even Python still seem to have some disadvantages that prevented that from happening.

C++ essentially killed C. Counterexamples exist but they're hard to find and sometimes involve there being no C++ compiler on the target.

D didn't replace C++. I wonder if that was related to the single proprietary implementation. The language seems more sensible to me.

Rust is aimed at replacing C and C++. There are others in the same field in various stages of development. Zig and carbon come to mind.

There's an uphill battle where lots of existing code is in C++ and people fear changing it. C was partly dismantled by C++ compilers promising better error diagnostics and being able to compile most C with minimal patching.

I personally think the end is in sight for C++ but the consensus seems to be it'll live forever.

D is 100% Boost licensed.

These days yes. Has LLVM and GCC front ends too, very easy to get going with it.

D wasn't Boost licensed when I looked at it as a replacement for C++ about a decade ago. Wiki thinks the backend has been available since 2017. It looks like the source may have been available for longer than that but I missed the distinction between source available and open source if it was. That's how I ended up on the C++ path instead of the D one anyway, seems a credible risk others have the same experience.

The front end was open sourced around 2005 or so, and it was also paired with gcc to have a fully open sourced Gnu D gdc compiler. There's also the fully open sourced ldc compile based on LLVM.

We couldn't get the dmd backend open sourced until 2017, but everything else was open sourced.

> I personally think the end is in sight for C++ but the consensus seems to be it'll live forever.

As the office Rust shill, I'm actually pretty excited about a lot of Herb Sutter's work [1]; I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that a hypothetical C++29 will be as ergonomic as unsafe Rust, with the not inconsiderable benefit of being able to speak the C++ ABI. I don't think large projects like LLVM or Unreal would dream of rewriting to Rust in that time, so people will still be writing it in some form or another.

[1]: My top 3 would probably be cppfront's argument passing semantics, metaclasses, and deferred_heap, in that order. The latter two, IMO, are improvements on what Rust provides in the area.

D didn't bring a lot to replace C, only C++. Compared to C it's a lot more of high level stuff, for niches where the language is dead for decades anyway, and not much more for the things C was still good at.

But Rust brings you OOP-like structures without the C++ hidden machinery, generics (the two main reason people adopted C++), and a lot of code verification. And the language isn't much more complex than C. That combination is very enticing.

I do believe both languages are about to die (C and C++). It's just that when languages die, nobody notices for a decade or so. Even develovers keep getting more numerous for some time, and have their numbers slowly reduce through decades.

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