None of the alternatives have stability. What was exemplary & idiomatic rust pre-pandemic would be churlish & rejected now and the toolchain use would be different anyway.

Carpenters, plumbers, masons & electricians work on houses 3-300 yrs old, navigate the range of legacy styles & tech they encounter, and predictably get good outcomes.

Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. C99, baby, why pay more?

When there’s an alternative that can compete with that sort of real-world durability, C will get displaced.

▲ cannonpr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Having just finished renovating a 140-year-old home with solid brick walls that was slowly collapsing and deteriorating due to the aforementioned professionals’ application of modern and chemically incompatible materials to it… I’m not sure I agree. It’s also why a lot of the UK’s building stock is slowly rotting with black mould right now. Literally none of the professionals I hired, before I trained them, knew how to properly repair a type of home that represents 30% of the UK building stock.

▲ ux266478 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability.

On the contrary, Lisp outshines C to a large degree here. Success has nothing to do with technical merit (if such a thing even exists), it's not a rational game.

▲

Panzer04 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What makes you say that?

	▲	ux266478 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Reduce is a Lisp library that's still in active use from 1968, making it older than C itself. We can point to GNU Emacs as an ancient and venerable self-contained Lisp tortoise with more wrinkles than are finitely enumerable, and is in fact a hosted Lisp operating system. Pulling it apart and working with it is admittedly a treat even if I loathe it as a text editor. Mezzano is a modern Lisp OS that you can play with in a VM, and might give you an idea of why Lisp is such a great systems language. In short: Lisp is semantic and geared towards a living system. The basic REPL is sh + cc + ld + db (and a few others) all in one. It's almost a little mind bending how nice these systems are put together, how cleanly they work. C is like pulling teeth in comparison. I'm not even a fan of Lisp or sexpr languages. But it's the obvious heavyweight champion of longetivity and ultra-pragmatic service record... Yes, even in the systems domain.

▲ okanat 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are:

- People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or applications in higher level programming languages.

- C hit a perfect balance of being a small enough language to grok, being indepedent of the system manufacturers, reflecting the computer architecture of 80s, actually small in syntax and code length and quite easy to implement compilers for. This caused lots of legacy software being built into the infrastructure that gave birth to the current contemporary popular OSes and more importantly the infrastructure of the Internet. Add in .com bubbles and other crises, we basically have/had zero economic incentive to replace those systems.

- Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well.

It doesn't mean that people haven't tried or even succeeded. Android was successful in multiple fronts in replacing C. Its "intents" and low level interface description language for hardware interfaces are great replacement for C ABI. Windows' COM is also a good replacement that gets rid of language dependence. There are still newer OSes try like Redox or Fuchsia.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 3 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. and so it was that after that date, all development of `embedded systems kernel drivers digital audio workstations video editors codecs for audio and video anything that involved actually controlling non-computer hardware game engines` came to a grinding halt, and no further work was done.
	▲	noosphr 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I'd never thought I'd see the day that anyone praises COM.
	▲	sinnsro 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> It doesn't mean that people haven't tried or even succeeded. Android was successful in multiple fronts in replacing C. Its "intents" and low level interface description language for hardware interfaces are great replacement for C ABI. Windows' COM is also a good replacement that gets rid of language dependence. There are still newer OSes try like Redox or Fuchsia. I am not sure I buy this from a system perspective, especially when taking this[1] into consideration. ______ 1. Alexis King's reply to "Why do common Rust packages depend on C code?". Link: https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/3237
	▲	trueismywork 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Name me a stable binary interface that is not ints and arrays of ints
	▲	chasil 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		In pieces of my code, I need to call setuserid() to manage some of the security that I designed in 2010. There was no Rust at that point, and I used the most basic tool that could do it. Could I have done this in Java with gymnastics of JNI, linking C into the JRE? Definite maybe.
	▲	kogasa240p 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well. IMO I do see this changing in the future as higher power computers become expensive once again, and I'm not just referring to the recent chip shortage.

▲ charleslmunger 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

C99, but with a million macros backporting features from newer language versions and compiler extensions. Lovely features you don't get with ordinary c99:

free_sized

#embed

static_assert

Types for enum

Alignof, alignas, aligned_alloc

_Atomic