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

[nclug at toykeeper.net]

* Brian Sturgill <bsturgill at ataman.com> wrote:
> 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.
> ...
> Seriously, it's time to move on from C.

I love C.  It's basically portable assembly language...  and 
that's a good thing.  It may not be appropriate for every 
project, but it's still relevant quite often.  C usage has 
actually been *increasing* in recent years.

For example, I frequently find myself writing code for really 
small chips like attiny13, attiny25, and attiny85.  These have 
1024, 2048, and 8192 bytes of flash ROM, respectively...  and 64 
to 512 bytes of RAM.

For those, every byte counts, and I frequently need to count 
clock cycles too.  So my only choices are assembly, C, or maybe a 
subset of C++.  This type of thing has been growing lately, 
thanks to cheap circuit printing.

But it's not just relevant for embedded systems.  Assembly (and 
portable assembly) is pretty important for almost anything which 
interfaces with hardware, so it remains extremely popular for 
kernel and system-level code, and for libraries.  It's what most 
of our computing foundations are made of.

Because of this, it's also important for other languages to have 
a way to interface with C code, to be able to access the 
foundations.

However, C is something I only use when I actually need it.  I 
default to higher-level languages the rest of the time, because C 
isn't a very good choice for most application-level code.


-- Selene