Post B7mMG97nFNSgZA5kJM by synlogic4242@vivaldi.net
 (DIR) More posts by synlogic4242@vivaldi.net
 (DIR) Post #B7m7tBGfiJvFC7Opuq by regehr@mastodon.social
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       RE: https://mastodon.social/@tonofcrates/116824302511635116under what circumstances should a new project in 2026 be written in C? curious what people think.RT: https://mastodon.social/users/tonofcrates/statuses/116824302511635116
       
 (DIR) Post #B7m7tBUqrbGTu62A1A by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       @regehr C remains king for cases where you just want to make some syscalls and not have to write a lot of boilerplate to get there...
       
 (DIR) Post #B7mJioDrjv4KH6uLwW by mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
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       @regehr if it wants to be portable, which ought to be the default for FOSS
       
 (DIR) Post #B7mLHVvlq9JRdKYZBw by ska@social.treehouse.systems
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       @regehr When you have written C all your life and know the language well enough to avoid its pitfalls, and are not as proficient with other languages so it would not be a good trade-off to switch.Also, when you don't want a bloated interpreter you'd have to trust, or a bloated proprietary runtime, or you don't want to interact with language-specific communities that are often less pleasant than the C ones.
       
 (DIR) Post #B7mMG97nFNSgZA5kJM by synlogic4242@vivaldi.net
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       @regehr at a min we need some new people to learn C because it could still easily be in critical systems in 20 years yet the current band of C experts are graybeards and either retiring or dying out. I'm sure theres a gradual replacement underway but  its slow. and it needs to be slow enough to be careful. we've already seen that the Rustaceans and vibe coder bros have not been careful enough. :-) which gets back to fact that the current graybeards are retiring or dying out. yes C imperfect but in the rush to migrate away we are in many cases switching from folks with 2-5 decades of programming experience to folks with 1 to 24 months. in broadstrokes. we'll need more youngblood with brains and attention to detail and geeky passion to take delight in C and take up its mantle a bit longer
       
 (DIR) Post #B7nFXDoKZYCHVA8wxE by geofflangdale@mastodon.social
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       @regehr It feels like an really uninspiring inflection point where I can't argue for C but I see tons of problems in everything else. For me C is "falling between two chairs" at the moment - thanks to the giant festival of UB from people trying to coax peak performance from C for "optimized" usages it doesn't feel like a reliable systems language, but it also sucks at scale due to being so rudimentary.A lot of newer alternatives don't have the mindshare so I think it would be ...
       
 (DIR) Post #B7nFXEEuyhSqpcaBOb by geofflangdale@mastodon.social
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       @regehr very bumpy to be at a BigCo or a broad reach open source project and demand everyone know Rust/Zig/Odin/whatever.Uncomfortably, I feel like as the niche gets smaller (fewer and fewer people need to program in a 'systems' language) the options get worse and less appealing. I wish there was a language with "high" and "low" variants that preserved as much syntax/tooling/... as possible but allowed both a barebones systems programming and a convenience "scale" programming.
       
 (DIR) Post #B7nFaSCLXMFAzYux9c by landley@mstdn.jp
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       @regehr The rust people turned me off hard even before they got AI-pilled. I'm happy to write stuff in lua and bash and have vaguely been curious about learning zig. But at this point I highly doubt I will ever even modify an existing rust program.