I've personally been very motivated to learn C (coming from Go) by witnessing @jart's[1] progress on Cosmopolitan[2] and Readbean[3]. Writing C is almost like an exercise in sovereignty: ultimate freedom (and danger).
[1]: https://justine.lol/
[1]: https://justine.lol/
The world has gotten a lot more dangerous than people realize. People generally quite correctly assume that hackers aren't going to spend person-months attacking their system personally but don't realize that the attacker tools are quite sophisticated now and they don't have to. Shoving code into a small little buffer overflow to lift to a larger buffer overflow to load exploit code over the network that will run a pre-packaged root priv escalation to install a rootkit to add them to their botnet is no longer the work of a team of hackers for months. It's all off-the-shelf tech now and it's more like writing a 20 line function now; you don't need to attract very much attention now to attract that level of sophistication.
We are leaving C behind collectively for very good reasons. If you are playing with C and you do not intimately understand those reasons, you're going to relearn them the hard way.
Maybe for embedded, I haven't done that, but for general purpose, I can't imagine it being worth the risks.
I looked at Rust and also some rewrites, and I am not convinced. Also especially Cargo is a complete disaster.
You may think you can handle C. I disagree. The evidence is on my side. We need safer languages.
Heck, that even overstates it. It's not like we need super-safe languages per se. Maybe the 2070s will disagree with me. But we need languages that aren't grotesquely unsafe. It's not just that C isn't as safe as a language could be; it is that it is recklessly unsafe.
Interrupting that descent is foolishness, and pinning your career to a resurrection in C even more foolish. These technologies always have this meta-meta-contrarian phase to them just before they expire. I got into the computer field just as the meta-meta-contrarian "everything must be written in assembler" phase was at its peak. It was a false resurrection and I pity anyone who overinvested in learning how to write large applications in 100% assembler as a result of reading someone's over-enthusiastic screed about the virtues of writing pure assembler in 1998.
So I write this in the hopes of helping some other young HN reader not be fooled. C may be a thing you learn at some point, some day, just as assembler is still something you may learn. But don't get overexcited about the last meta-meta-contrarian false resurrection before death. Which is still years away, but at this point I think it's pretty much set on an irrevocable course.
I also agree that C still needs to become safer, and especially the defaults. And it will.
Because we have the benefit of hindsight. We tried putting the responsibility in programmers' hands. It didn't work. We're now learning from that experience and building better tools that can do the same job, more safely. It's foolish not to use them.
> Whatever language you believe in probably depends on C. You live in a C world. The value prop of the programming languages other than C/C++ for systems programming is that they build cohesive social communities and C is in the background serving them all. The whole "we're going to save you from the bogeyman" is just kool aid.
No one is expecting the new languages to make computing suddenly error-free from top to bottom. It's about reducing the size of the surface where errors can be introduced. You're attacking a strawman here.