> Saying they're not fit for purpose doesn't seem correct.

I'll quite happily say they were never fit for purpose. C had a role in bootstrapping early software development in the absence of anything better but once Lisp, Delphi, Smalltalk and Java arrived on the scene then it, and its equally footgunnable variants, should have been pushed to the margins where hardware constraint was the primary consideration.

Writing a browser in C++ in the 21st century was ridiculous and irresponsible.

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aenis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ekhem. When Chrome was announced there wasnt Rust. And Java was a programming language for slow moving systems, with many a flaws and its own classes of footguns.

I dont think they had much of a choice in 2008. Now? Sure. I bet a rust port is in the works.

	▲	floil 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is correct (I worked on chrome in 2008) it's important to remember that chrome's renderer was webkit, an existing c++ stack. Chrome's stability innovation was to run different tabs in different processes, and the security innovation was then to sandbox those processes. Rust would have been super nice but it wasn't an option then, and of course let's remember that Rust was developed by Mozilla specifically with the goal of making safer browsers.