> This might be a dumb question, but using this + clang bounds-safety, whats the difference between this and something like Zig or Odin.

I really need to learn more about Zig, but from what I know, there are still worlds of possibilities that a modern, well-designed language offers over something like lib0xc. Zig's ability to evaluate any expression at compile-time is one such example.

But generally, lib0xc gives you bounds-safety everywhere it can. Languages like Zig and Rust give you type-safety to their own degrees, which I think is a superset.

> What do you think C would need in order to reach the user experience of those languages?

Not really having direct user experience, it's hard for me to say. But if I what I can give you is a list of features that would make large parts of lib0xc irrelevant:

1. Protocols/traits

2. Allocating from a caller's stack frame (think, returning the result of `alloca` to the caller)

3. printf format specifiers for stdint.h types and for octet strings

4. Ability to express function parameter lists as structures

5. New sprintf family that returns a value which is always less than or equal to the size passed (no negative values)

Basically, I think that the C standard should be working aggressively to cut down on the use cases for heap allocation and `void *`. And I think that the bounds safety annotations should become first-class language features.

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onlyrealcuzzo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I really need to learn more about Zig, but from what I know, there are still worlds of possibilities that a modern, well-designed language offers over something like lib0xc.

Doesn't Apple have a nice `defer { }` block for cleanup? Did you include that in lib0xc? I didn't see in on your README.

	▲	akoboldfrying 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In C++ you can implement such a thing using destructors, which are guaranteed to run in reverse order on scope exit even in the presence of exceptions. Alexei Alexandrescu's Scopeguard did this (in the 90s I think, long before C++11). But in standard C, there's no mechanism that this could be attached to (especially if you want to use "C exceptions", a.k.a. setjmp()/longjmp()). Maybe the compilers they support all have non-standard extensions that allow something like this though?

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anthk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wouldn't the last case (void *) hurt embedded C development, or retrogaming with direct memory access and pointers?

	▲	debo_ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They said "cut down", not "eliminate."