I was waiting for the part where author advocates for what they like but no it’s just a rant

Spending out something better isn’t easy. As an applications developer I want to ask “Why don’t you just use Java/C#?” and I’d go so far to say that the software reuse revolution behind Java was not OO or it’s particular approach to OO but rather the garbage collector.

That is, building applications out of premade parts is a struggle in C or C++ or rust because memory management is part of the API. C devs would be very concerned about having control of memory allocation and would like to have the choice of reusing a buffer from the application in the library or have the library allocate into an arena managed by the application, etc. It’s complicated enough that libraries can’t reasonably support every scenario application developers would like and ultimately tough because to free something the application has to know if the library is done with it or the library has to know if the application is done with it…. However, the garbage collector knows!. In the end there are a lot of libraries you can’t really write for C or if you can write them you have to write them assuming the application allocates or a certain way or you lose the benefit of being in control of allocation that C allegedly gives you.

On the flip side I think C is too high level in some cases, for instance you come to think the gymnastics involved in written embedded C or device drivers are normal but there are quite a few things that are a little bit cleaner in assembly language and I write things for AVR-8 that are rather small but it drives me nuts that C is moving the stack pointer around and following calling conventions that are not at all necessary for these particular programs.

I had friends who worked in the IBM Mainframe world where it is still common for applications to have bits written in assembly because of efficiency or to get finer control than you can get with COBOL. Part of the COBOL puzzle is that you have to be a Macro Assembler programmer to work on that stuff and you can’t just port it to GNU COBOL on Linux without also porting the assembly!

We’re still living in a multi-architecture world so the interesting idea of trying to make it easier to write assembly (imagine a super macro assembler with an integrated theorem prover) is a non-starter. Let x86 founder for a decade and if RISC-V makes no progress that picture could be different in a few years.