I for one think that we have lost a number of good opportunities to make C language a better and .ore powerful one.
IMHO what I would need with C is a powerful pre-processor like jinja2 and some symbol manipulation features too.
IMHO what I would need with C is a powerful pre-processor like jinja2 and some symbol manipulation features too.
That is what happens to languages that leave their authors behind and embrace design by committee.
Standardizing libraries is one thing I really favor. But force fitting them into the language itself maybe like over-engineering.
Let me have an example. qsort() and bsearch() are powerful but the call/return overhead is really unbearable. A (much) more powerful pre-processor which is really part of the language (and maybe syntax-aware) could help in creating templates that would generate solid code for either function with the bare minimum overhead.
I am not saying like C++ templates, but like C++ templates.