jerstlouis3

The main safety issue really is with dealing with string management. We started working on a more full-featured String class for eC, but never quite managed to perfect it to the point where it could replace all use cases for traditional C string manipulations... Still hoping to get there!

I realize this is not super clear, and in fact we have an open issue to improve on where reference counting are done automatically.

At the moment, only global and member instances get automatically incremented/decremented.

There is a plan to extend that to local instances as well.

But also `delete object` will automatically decref and delete if reaching 0.

In practice, this all saves a lot of manual allocation/deallocation efforts compared to plain C, but it's all fairly low level (which was by design).

< > are used for template arguments, just as in the familiar C++ syntax.

Not a big fan of the syntax myself, but that seemed like the right decision at the time :)

Similar reason for ::, inspired from C++.

Very much alive, just not gaining traction.

The slowdown in development is mostly because eC works relatively well and the efforts of our small development team are spent mostly using it rather than improving it :)

Hi everyone, Jerome here who designed eC 20 years ago. Happy to see this momentary spike of interest in eC :)

eC is still very much alive, but it never gained much traction, as few languages without a major backer do. Our latest efforts over the last decade have been more about using eC rather than trying to make it gain popularity, as well as working on geospatial Open Standards.

Just wanted to point out that the project and language (and the related FOSS Cross-Platform Ecere SDK) are alive and well, and I do hope to find time or resources to address some of the issues pointed out in this thread.

Cheers!