[NCLUG] A brief note about C and potential successors.

[Brian Sturgill]

I asked about Go usage at the last meeting and was met with quite a number
of people expressing disdain that I thought C should be replaced. I've
programmed in C since 1980 and used very early versions of C++ from Bell
Labs (when it still translated to C). I was an early user of the Bliss
programming language but quickly saw that C was much more portable. I made
the switch to C from Assembly language around the time C was about twice
the overhead over hand-coded assembly. Having read Mythical Man-Month, I
was well aware that the key factor in a programming language is how quickly
one can express what needs done (in a maintainable manner). Many of my
friends at the time resisted the move to C believing that the overhead was
too large. However, C easily required an order of magnitude less code to
get a job done... it was a clear win in all but the most CPU intensive of
tasks.

So, what I want to point out is that all the big places see the problem
with C.

Apple has Swift.
Mozilla, has Rust.
Google has Go.
And now Microsoft has a Rust fork:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-were-creating-a-new-rust-based-programming-language-for-secure-coding/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic+optin&utm_campaign=awareness&utm_content=20191207+prog+nl&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkdJNU1HSTBZV0V4TkRRMyIsInQiOiI5TjloM0Zzc2R3NnZrOHJhSlV0RWx6WFMrcnFKQ1BSZ1dqbDhHY0FjTzJQY1lFTHJ5citrcklEcUJHcmFCeFljcnY5QmUrTlowVWh4NCsrblRiNHpkRWY1UHUzRmNUam9pbzNLZlBqS3puQld0K2VpZ2NRWXhKaW5mNm5qdm5mZyJ9

The big problem C solved was increased expressiveness while still providing
speed.

It however has many problems from it's legacy creation. For example header
files and memory handling. All those things made sense then, but they need
to be abandoned for more modern approaches.

Swift, Rust, and Go all are about 2 times times the overhead of C.
They all solve most of C's problems, yet still provide good efficiency.
They also require less lines of code to express a given task.
They are built with maintainability in mind.
They all compile QUICKLY.

You may have noticed I don't include C++ here. C++ has nearly all of C's
flaws.
C++ "solutions" for things like strings may actually be worse than the the
problems they were trying to solve.
I'll also point to Rob Pike's take on C++:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4554

I used to do a lot of stuff with Google and saw a Rob Pike talk about C++,
he said that recently he moved to a new office that only half the space of
his old one. He said moving to the smaller space was simple, he left his
printed copy of the C++ spec behind.
[I had a printed copy of the pre-11 C++ spec, it was several feet tall
(doubled sided, laser printed)]

Seriously, it's time to move on from C.

Brian

-- 

Brian