- pointers to bitfields
- checked bitshifts
- small ints like u4
- imperative array initialization blocks
- test code blocks
- equivalent of debugger; keyword from js
- some vague stuff about being able to do at compile time
I would love to see Rust get compile-time execution that is as capable as Zig or C++20.
Can you give examples? Const functions are pretty capable in Rust already.
Isn't that just macros which are way more powerful than what Zig or C++20 offer?
I still write about C anyway. It may not trend, but it lasts.
I spent a substantial fraction of my professional career writing C, and I remain interested in WG14 (the language committee) and in several projects written in C though I avoid writing any more of it myself.
The reason it's so widespread is called "Worse is Better" and I believe that has somewhat run its course. If you weren't aware of "Worse is better" a quick Google should find you the original essay on that topic years back.
In contrast when I read an article about say Zig, or Swift, I am more likely to learn something new.
But I can certainly endorse your choice to write about whatever you want - life is too short to try to get a high score somehow.
Maybe I am biased, but for professional work, I stay with Go. I have built large distributed data systems that handle hundreds of millions of business transactions daily, and Go has been steady and reliable for that scale. Its simplicity, strong concurrency model, and easy deployment make it practical for production systems. I still enjoy exploring Zig and Rust in my spare time, but for shipping real systems, Go continues to get the job done without getting in the way.
> I have never deployed any production C code and I would not choose C for professional work either
What do you write about C, if not for practical usage in the industry? Can you post some links?
FWIW, since you seem interested, here are some blog posts of mine specifically about practical usage of C, some of which got a little discussion here on HN in the past:
https://www.lelanthran.com/chap13/content.html
If you have some spare time, I would really like to hear more about your experiences. It sounds like you have worked with C for a long time, and that kind of insight is hard to find now.
Most people around me started with JavaScript or TypeScript as their first language, and for many, that is still all they know. I mean no disrespect, it is just how things are today. It would be great to hear how your view of programming has changed over the years and what lessons from C still matter in your work today.
Am I old? I am 31, and I started with C around age 14 (writing mods for ioquake3 forks), been my most used programming language ever since.
I've already replied to you in a sibling post, but I have been writing in C since the mid-90s; there's really not that much insight you get specifically to C.
Articles about C never get much traffic, but that is fine. I wrote it because I care about how things really work, not because I expect it to trend. If even a few people read it and see the beauty in the old language that still runs the world, that is enough.
I hope next month I will have more time to write deep dives into the internals of SQLite, PostgreSQL, Redis and maybe curl, all written in C.
what gets me personally is what you describe at https://github.com/little-book-of/c/blob/main/articles/zig-i... - zig is made to feel easy and modern for people who don't know any better, and it does this well. But as soon as you actually need to do complex stuff, it gets in the way moreso than C and it's current environment/ecosystem will.
And to be fair, as much as I enjoyed writing in C in my younger years - I only use C when I actually need C. And asm when I actually need asm. Most of my code now uses higher level languages - this puts zig into such a niche.. it feels like golang to me: the cool language that isn't really solving as much of a need as you'd think.
- https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/04/07/writing-c-for-curl/
- https://www.sqlite.org/whyc.htmlThe "how to modify an environment variable" bit and the bin-dec-hex table made me feel the same way. Then I saw the part explaining how to check for duplicates in a row... I'm struggling to understand the point of the article. Testing a text generator?