zlacker

The main reason for the persistence of C despite its warts and general mess is just "first-mover advantage": it was the first, therefore it has more libraries/packages/development of the ecosystem than the alternatives.

Stop being lazy, go back to engineering first principles and it makes little sense to stay with C. [Insert systems programming language du jour] or any other well-developed language makes more sense.

>>dzogch+(OP)
... Yes.

>>dzogch+(OP)
I see nothing wrong with this statement. Spice it up by inserting Rust at the blank and I can fully agree.

>>dzogch+(OP)
It's not just "first-mover advantage". I wouldn't even say it's mainly first-mover advantage.

It's the need to maintain super legacy systems and interoperability. There are entire CPU architectures that LLVM does not support and are only commonly supported by C and these things are still everywhere and are really gnarly problems to replace them.

Even if you throw everything away on the software side and start over from scratch, that's going to _force_ you to replace some hardware somewhere that you won't or can't replace.