The problem the author has is not with the C programming language, no argument here is about some language construct or some abstraction within it, in fact very little about the actual language is said. To me it is very clear that the issues described do not lie with C(++), the programming language, but with C(++), the language which powers everything from a 8-bit micro controller to the most modern super computer and almost every operating system you can try to put on top of them. With any language as ubiquitous as C these issues about types had to arise at some point and the reason that most languages "feel" much more streamlined regarding types, is because they never pretend to care about some obscure niche architecture. The same goes for "C as the language of ABIs", it is a very simplifying choice to have the ABI of your OS be described in the programming language of the kernel. Sure, it does not need to be, but if your language is the layer between software and hardware, maybe it has some right to dictate how you talk to it.

Any language which wants to have a comparable feature set to C in terms of breadth of platforms and depth of penetration will run into issues like this. Maybe it can, with the benefit of half a century of hindsight, make better choices.

> Any language which wants to have a comparable feature set to C in terms of breadth of platforms and depth of penetration will run into issues like this. Maybe it can, with the benefit of half a century of hindsight, make better choices.

I've been saying a variation of this for half a decade now. My version is: the only way to do everything that c/c++ does is to be just as terrible as they are. Replacing them therefore requires a small host of languages in order to do it.

Which is what we're seeing now: D, P, Rust, Zig, Odin, Carbon, Go, C#, Java. They're all slowly chipping away from what we used to need c/c++ to do. I think we probably need one or two more (and then more maturity for several of the existing options) before the process is complete and we're left with a bunch of languages in their own niches and c/c++ in a small niche of their own.

P?

px-1">https://github.com/p-org/P

EDIT: It looks like it's also being used in AWS.