Arrays decaying to pointers is probably the biggest non-platform specific design oversight.
As you said, it's easy to see where it came from, but it should've been fixed long ago.
As you said, it's easy to see where it came from, but it should've been fixed long ago.
Is 27 years for you not long ago enough? That's more than a generation away and closer to the invention of the language than today.
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/varar...
Beside the sibling comment about this specific proposal, I also think that fat pointers don't belong in the C standard. There is nothing in the C standard that says that pointers on the abstract C machine don't come with the allocated size, in fact the behaviour is described as if they do. Pointers are essentially scoped by allocation. All that is missing is code for that in a C implementation, the language allows that just fine.
Fat pointers are clearly a way to deal with arrays (and also get "slices" and non-zero terminated strings for free!), but it's just not possible to retrofit them into the language without breaking existing code.