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Comment by throwaway27448 | Hacker News Reader

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Embedded programming is still in C for a lot of micro controllers and whatnot. If you’re programming with limited resources it’s essential to understand pointers and arrays. Likely you won’t be doing anything useful without them

I understand certain programmers are chained to C. We should use this opportunity to castigate the people who don't target better languages rather than trying to work with clearly outdated tools.

What about just letting people decide for themselves instead of telling them what they should and shouldn't do.

Some times they need a little help from legislators.

Bruh

Could you crawl back to reddit? Thanks

Sir (generously), we deserve better than half-assed software in 2026. Please leave your racist-ass bigotry in the alps

With very few exceptions like PICs, most of them also support C++, which has nice goodies like span and views, that can be optionally bounds checked.

Because C is an exceptionally unopinionated language. For some people having a programming language that doesn't have a strong opinion on how things are supposed to work is a good thing.

Most modern languages start with fixing C's warts (good) but then at some point turn into 'tech manifestos' (for lack of a better word). C is refreshingly devoid of opinion and that's what makes it so extremely flexible and timeless.

> Because C is an exceptionally unopinionated language.

Compared to what?

Anyway I find it hard to believe enabling suicide is a good thing

> Compared to what?

...for somewhat recent languages: Rust, Zig, Odin... (with differing intensity, but they all want to nudge the programmer into a certain direction of how to do things).

> Anyway I find it hard to believe enabling suicide is a good thing

"War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength" ;)

Seriously, if people want to write their programs in assembly code or whatever weird kink, just let them. In the end it is the job of the runtime environment to sandbox untrusted code.

Because half the world revolves around C fundamentals, sadly enough. Things would be a lot better if there existed a non-C portable way to share libraries across language boundaries (including libC).

The C abi is not C. Using C is a bad decision.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

As always, the TIOBE Index is of dubious value. The fact that it ranks Delphi above both Go and Rust should give you an idea of why.

Yeah it's rather odd, also jumps like this in ADA makes you wonder

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ada/

Ada is being discussed a lot on HN as some sort of 'lost utopia', and AFAIK Tiobe doesn't count actual usage but (more or less) mentions.

C is hardly any path forward

It's not much different from any other high level programming language. Just a different set of compromises to accept.

Yes why would anyone choose to make a fool of themselves when they could choose to build instead?

p.s. in case you don't want to follow the link, number 2 on the list

And yet so few other languages attempt to have a stable ABI (other than by...mimicking C).

C doesn't have a stable ABI, most folks mistake the ABI from OS written in C, with an imaginary C ABI.

OS ABIs are usually stable though ;)

Finally someone getting it right though. C doesn't have any ABI per se, compilers need to implement whatever ABI a specific operating system defines (otherwise the language would be pretty useless since it couldn't call into operating system functions).

Even then, arrays can be encoded and enforced on each side. It would be simpler to enforce this via the abi—but the abi itself does not open issues with array description and access

Sure that's technically correct, but in practice it means I get a stable ABI :).

The ABI is not the issue.

It's an issue if you want different software components to talk to each other without IPC.

Most languages can interoperate with the C abi without commiting you to using the language itself. In fact I can't think of a single language that both produces software people actually use and doesn't interoperate with the c abi.

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